Tips and Tricks WP eCommerce

eCommerce Solution for WordPress Blog

WP eStore – Amazon S3 Integration Addon

The Amazon S3 Integration addon allows you to securely store and deliver digital downloads using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

You can serve the private/protected files from your amazon S3 account using this addon.

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Selling Large Files with WP eStore

WP eStore does not impose any restriction on the downloadable file size. As long as your server can handle it eStore will be fine. We have users serving files as big as 8 Giga bytes (GB) in size using the eStore plugin.

With that said, WP eStore sits between the actual file and the browser creating a shield (this is how eStore keeps the true location of the file hidden). However this means that eStore has to read the file and serve it to the browser (meaning the file will be temporarily loaded in your server’s RAM). If you are selling large files and your hosting plan has a limited RAM available for you to use then this could create a file download issue (the file won’t be downloaded fully).

When hosting companies refer to *unlimited* disk space they refer to the hard disk space not the RAM memory size. So make sure to ask your hosting provider how much RAM memory is available to your PHP application. To better understand this… imagine a computer having 500GB hard disk but having only 32MB RAM (see the difference between them?).

There are a few possible workarounds that can be tried:

  1. You could break the bigger file into multiple parts (e.g. each 50MB) and use the multi-part download option of eStore.
  2. Try one of the other download methods explained here and see how you go (there are a few different ways to get around this depending on your server’s configuration but it may not work on all servers).
  3. Use the Amazon S3 Integration option of eStore.
  4. Edit the eStore product in question and uncheck the “downloadable” checkbox for the product (look under the “Digital Content Details” section for this option). This will force eStore to let the browser handle the download.
  5. If you server supports mod_xsendfile (its an Apache module to handle large file downloads) then we can configure eStore to work with “mod_xsendfile” so large files can be downloaded without any issues.
  6. You can upgrade your hosting to a plan with enough RAM.

The bottom line is… Please make sure to check with your service provider about any upload/download restrictions or the available server RAM your hosting plan may have before you purchase the eStore plugin.