I have been strongly recommended to use XSendfile since we are serving quite large files from our server. The server is running Cpanel. Previously we were using a straight force
If you are getting 0 bytes it could be output compression needs disabled,see here for more. For the XSendFilePath not allowed here error that is a syntax problem with your .htaccess. Check it manually if you can to ensure it is in the right place per the documentation.