Large File Download

Question

Internet Explorer has a file download limit of 4GB (2 GB on IE6). Firefox does not have this problem (haven\'t tested safari yet) (More info here: http://support.microsoft.com/

Answer 1

@levand:

My actual preference, as a user, in these situations is to download a lightweight .exe file that downloads the file for you.

That's a dealbreaker for many, many sites. Users either are or should be extremely reluctant to download .exe files from websites and run them willy-nilly. Even if they're not always that cautious, incautious behaviour is not something we should encourage as responsible developers.

If you're working on something along the lines of a company intranet, a .exe is potentially an okay solution, but for the public web? No way.

@TonyB:

What is the best way to do this without using FTP.

I'm sorry, but I have to ask why the requirement. Your question reads to me along the lines of "what's the best way to cook a steak without any meat or heat source?" FTP was designed for this sort of thing.

Answer 2

There are some users that will be behind corporate firewalls that don't permit FTP...

Are users with restrictive firewalls like that likely to be permitted to install and run a .exe file from your website?

Answer 3

A few ideas:

• Blizzard use a light-weight .exe BitTorrent wrapper for their patches. I'm not entirely sure how it is done, but it looks like a branded version of the official BitTorrent client.
• Upload to Amazon S3, provide the torrent link of the file (all S3 files are automatically BitTorrent-enabled), plus the full HTTP download link as alternative. See S3 documentation

Answer 4

Please don't use ActiveX... I am so sick of sites that are only viewable in IE.

My actual preference, as a user, in these situations is to download a lightweight .exe file that downloads the file for you.

Answer 5

I say click-once installed download manager, similar to msdn.

But becoming a CDN without a more optimized protocol for the job is no easy task. I can't imagine a business model that can be worthwhile enough to have such large file downloads as a core competency unless you are doing something like msdn. If you create a thick client, you at least get the chance to get some more face time with the users, for advertising or some other revenue model, since you will probably be paying in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to host such a service.

Answer 6

@travis

Unfortunately It has to be over HTTP inside the users browser. I'll update the question to be more clear about that.