Downloadable products hosted elsewhere - can it work?

First of all, this forum has been immensely helpful. I've been lurking for a while, but I've solved most Zen Cart problems just by doing searches here.

And now, well, I've got a question about downloadable products to toss out here... it's pretty much assumed that any downloadable product is going to be hosted on your server in the 'download' folder. But is it at all possible to have your download products hosted on a different account/host? Is there a way to configure Zen Cart to do that?

Not at all easy to be automatic....You could manually mail the link. but how are you going to control access and the # of times and so forth

Is there an issue with loading them to your Zen Cart?

Only that the web host we currently have wouldn't be able to handle the bandwidth... that's the main issue right now.

Only that the web host we currently have wouldn't be able to handle the bandwidth... that's the main issue right now.
As a download product - is this compressed or are your referring to something like streaming video?

I have this issue also and would love to see some ansers for these 2 scenarios:

1. Streaming video for DVD - can this be hosted elsewhere? Is there even a mod to allow streaming video for Zen Cart?
2. Download large video file - can be up to 1gb. Hosting companies may only allow 5gb transfer a month!

I'd say it's preferable to host it elsewhere as the server setup for streaming video is going to be a bit different from that needed for Zen Cart side of your site. There are companies out there that specialise in hosting streaming video with servers configured specifically for it and located around the world so that the requests can be delivered relatively locally to the site's visitor.

These guys typically work their charges based on your usage and so don't have the same usage caps as regular hosts.

I'm not aware of any Zen Cart mods for this, but suspect that it would be a relatively easy call to the streaming host, with the hard work done at their end.

Hello,

Just wondering if you've made any progress on this? I'm trying to do the same thing. A response from Dr.Byte to my post mentioned that he remembered posting some messages and possibly some code to a similar request a while ago. I'm going through the forums right now trying to find that info.

Regards,
Chris

PaperMoon:

First of all, this forum has been immensely helpful. I've been lurking for a while, but I've solved most Zen Cart problems just by doing searches here.

And now, well, I've got a question about downloadable products to toss out here... it's pretty much assumed that any downloadable product is going to be hosted on your server in the 'download' folder. But is it at all possible to have your download products hosted on a different account/host? Is there a way to configure Zen Cart to do that?