International secure large file sharing?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I have a friend who sells a very large sample library (2GB) but he’s located in Scandinavia. He’s resorted to using Dropbox to share files with customers, but it’s a goddamn nightmare since any of them can accidentally delete the files and he has to reupload them all the time. He claims that Amazon S3 and almost every major file sharing service he’s looked into is North America only.

This seems hard for me to believe, but was curious if anyone knew if there was a better system that was also reasonably secure (login required)?

2

amazon S3 isn’t US only. I use it for my demos.

3

Amazon has cloud datacenters in the EU (Ireland) and Asia (Singapore and Tokyo) so I doubt that very much.

4

May have been a cost issue – he said he’d looked into it last year and it wasn’t feasible, but I’ll double check with him (he’s located in Sweden).

5

You don’t have to give access to your account or share a folder with Dropbox, you can generate a public URL so they just need the link. Then they can’t delete it.

6

He doesn’t want it easily shareable since it’s a commercial sample library he’s selling. I know, it’s rather silly to stress so much about piracy given anyone who buys it could easily just torrent it themselves (or reshare on dropbox), but I’m not having that argument with him again…

7

Stick the sample library in an encrypted RAR, rename the file to something like “Iron.Man.2.1080p.Swedish.Subs.AXXRAWR.rar” so it won’t look out of place, and stick it on rapidshare. End of problem.

8

I’m not sure I understand his security requirements. Could he just put it on a web server behind a username/password, or is that not secure enough?

9

My understanding is that the file transfer costs from a traditional Web host would be too much since it’s a 2GB file. I’m just trying to figure out ANYTHING to get him off of this ghetto Dropbox setup right now, which he’s using since it gives some semblance of security (sharing) and no bandwidth costs.

10

Well the “no bandwidth cost” requirement is a hard one, given what he’s distributing. He can rent a server at Hetzner.de for 50 euro/month that has 10TB of traffic included (with additional ~7euro per TB). That comes to about 1 cent per customer/download, can he live with that?

edit: S3 hosting would cost about 20 cents per download, which isn’t that expensive either