Massive, simple, customized file uploading

August 3, 2009 7:11 AM

I need to hire a file upload service for a printing company so their customers can send files that can be in excess of 2GB.

I'm thinking something like Rapidshare and its brethren, that :

0) Does not require the customers to sign up, in or on, or download anything, and is super simple to use.
1) Allow a customized frontend, with my client's colors, logo, etc.
2) Sends some sort of notification to my client whenever a file is uploaded.
3) Allows some sort of organization, so maybe each customer has their own folder (which might contravene point 0, I realize, so maybe there's some sort of intermediate solution).
4) Is fast.
5) Has essentially no size limits.
6,7,8,9) Is 100% reliable, stable, etc.

Price is an issue, but not the main one.

posted by signal to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Your own FTP server? You could probably have an intern write a customized application that had a customized frontend and was only useful for uploading stuff to your FTP server. Or you could just expect your clients to know how to do so themselves, which they would (or would quickly figure out).
posted by Nonce at 7:23 AM on August 3

"how to do so" => "how to upload stuff via FTP"
posted by Nonce at 7:23 AM on August 3

My employer (giant global prepress vendor) uses Mass Transit for most of our client and inter-location needs. It does have a web plugin, but I believe it can also upload without use of the plugin.
posted by nathan_teske at 7:39 AM on August 3

Dropbox.
posted by SansPoint at 9:52 AM on August 3 [1 favorite]

Does the printing company already have a login / customer service page? If so, it'd be trivial to customize it to allow upload to an FTP site. The challenge is that the default tools suck, and the customers may become angry at you for the slow uploads they pay their own ISP for. 2GB+ is a lot of data, and my rough calculation shows it takes about 14 hours at 40kb/sec.

Default FTP tools on Windows are mostly crap. There's an ancient FTP program you should basically avoid if possible. There's also an FTP client in Internet Explorer and Firefox. I'm not sure how well these do in the face of network disconnections. Or how well they do at the 2GB and 4GB barriers. Programs tend to crash at those file sizes. The last thing you want to see at the end of a 2.1GB upload is an email requesting to retry.
posted by pwnguin at 2:58 PM on August 3

Does the printing company already have a login / customer service page?

Nope. They have a vanilla webpage that I developed. No login, etc.

FTP is probably a non-starter. I don't think we can expect their clients to download, install and learn how to use FTP.
posted by signal at 3:04 PM on August 3

drop.io?
posted by MeatLightning at 3:30 PM on August 3

IE and Firefox come with FTP support. I make the case that they're not great, but I have no direct evidence to link to saying they won't suffice.
posted by pwnguin at 3:48 PM on August 3

S3 allows uploads.

You can use your own forms, & there are Flash plugins for asp.net & Ruby on Rails. It redirects following a successful upload, so you could notify however you like. If you wanted different areas for each company, set up different forms for each. S3 is pretty fast, reliable, & stable. The only shortcoming I see is the 5-gig-per-file limit, which I'm not sure is a problem.
posted by Pronoiac at 6:59 PM on August 4 [1 favorite]