mod_xsendfile alternatives for a shared hosting service without it

Question

I'm trying to log download statistics for .pdfs and .zips (5-25MB) in a rails app that I'm currently developing and I just hit a brick wall; I found out our shared hosting provider doesn't support mod_xsendfile. The sources I've read state that without this, multiple downloads could potentially cause a DoS issue—something I'm definitely trying to avoid. I'm wondering if there are any alternatives to this method of serving files through rails?

Answer 1

Well, how sensitive are the files you're storing?

If you hosted these files somewhere under your app's /public directory, you could just do a meta tag or javascript redirect to the public-facing URL of these files after your users hit some sort of controller action that will update your download statistics.

In this case, your users would probably need to get one of those "Your download should commence in a few moments" pages before the browser would start the file download.

Under this scenario, your Rails application won't be streaming the file out, your web server will, which will give you the same effect as xsendfile. On the other hand, this won't work very well if you need to control access to those downloadable files.