Any advice?

[Matt Black]

Hi all.

I'm have no experience with websites so please bare with me.
I have a few questions regarding an idea for a website. This is a B2B site and the subject is pretty boring.

I'm researching a site where that let people in the production / media industry download all the latest advertising. Print, radio, TV etc.

The idea is that you log on and choose a category that you would like to buy. Once the payment has been made they are given a unique password and a link would be sent to the visitor via email. From this link they can type in the password and download the file.

One problem I have is the size of the file. We talking 600mb or so. The quality of the work needs to be high res.
Should I break up the file into smaller 100mb files?
I tried to zip a 390mb file and it compressed it to 368mb. Not much help.
Does this sound like an expensive site to build?
Someone mentioned a dedicated server to host the large files?
Please explain.

Many thanks in advance.

Matt

[Chris]

Don't break it up.

A professional business user who needs such large files should have the capability to download such large files.

Yes, this would be an expensive site to build.

For large file storage I'd look into using Amazon or Google, a service like that. Their web services charge right down to the megabyte and are really good infrastructure wise. You just gotta learn the integration. Your actual ecommerce site can then be hosted elsewhere.

WARNING - digital download sites are one of the biggest victims of credit card fraud, you may have a hard time finding good processing because of this.

[chipstorm]

Would definitely be better to break up the downloads into 100MB at the most, since connections are bound to fail often with a download any bigger than that. Besides, a single file as massive as 600MB will slow down a computer considerably. I think users would find it more convenient to have a few smaller downloads of files that will open quickly than one long download which might fail right in the middle and frustrate them with how hard it is to open.