How to determine your Remote Product File URL
When you use our Remotely Hosted Downloads feature, you can upload each product's file to your own Web server and simply configure your products with their Remote Product File URL (rather than uploading the files to our servers via our Seller Admin). This could be the server which hosts your Web site, or a dedicated file-hosting service such as Amazon S3. Our download delivery service would cloak the real remote URL of your files, so buyers would have no way of accessing your original remote file directly, nor could they even tell that their file download did not originate from E-junkie.
Web site hosting
If you will be hosting your download files on the same server hosting your Web site, typically you would use FTP to upload your files, or your Web site hosting control panel may have an uploader you can use.
Most Web site hosts specify a particular folder where all your Web pages and other Web-accessible files must be uploaded, so when you start an FTP uploading session, you would first open that "Web folder" and then start uploading your files into that folder, or into an even-deeper subfolder within it -- e.g., this Web folder may be named public_html
, or htdocs
, or web
, or www
, or simply matching your site's base domain name like example.com
, or something else entirely. You are probably already familiar with this folder name from having uploaded your Web site, but consult your hosting company's help pages or support staff if you need clarification on this.
Now, here's the tricky part. That special Web folder name will not be included in your Remote Product File URLs, as it's implicit in the fact that we'll be accessing the file via a Web URL starting with http://
(since nothing outside that folder would be accessible via the Web) -- e.g., if your Web folder name is public_html
, and you upload your product files into a subfolder of that named foldername
, then your Remote Product File URL would look like this example:
http://www.example.com/foldername/filename.ext
Note that the portion of a URL after the domain name is usually case-sensitive -- e.g., FileName.EXT
is not the same as filename.ext
. Also, URLs cannot use spaces, so if the folder/filenames on your servers have any spaces, you should replace each space with a %20
(the URL encoding for a space character) in your Remote Product File URLs -- e.g., a file named File Name.ext
inside a directory named Folder Name
would be accessible via a URL like this example:
http://www.example.com/Folder%20Name/File%20Name.ext
Dedicated file-hosting services
These would each typically have their own URL scheme, so you'd need to consult their help pages or support staff to get more information about how their URLs work. In order to work with our service, they must be able to provide a public and static URL which does not ever change, to access the file directly without requiring the downloader to go through a "download page" nor even use an actual Web browser program (since it will be our back-end download scripts accessing your remote file, not the buyer's browser directly). Note that "public" does not mean your file would be listed or exposed anywhere for the general public to discover; it just means the file can be accessed by anyone who already knows the exact URL of that file, similar to having an unlisted phone number, and we do not reveal your remote file URLs to anybody.
We recommend using Amazon S3 for basic file hosting that's very affordable (may even be free for your usage) and known to work well with E-junkie; please see this Tips page for detailed instructions.