Digital Downloads load handling and infrastructure

[veloxenium]

Hi there,

I'm working on a Shopify digital storefront for an upcoming feature film on which I expect to receive a high amount of traffic, as it was created and promoted by a high-profile celebrity. My client wants to be able to distribute the film via this digital storefront. I would like to know:

1. How many concurrent downloads of a large file (5-10GB+) the Shopify platform can handle. If you can ballpark to the nearest 10,000, that'd be sufficient.
2. If the official Shopify Digital Downloads app is the right solution for this job.

I have hosted a digital storefront on the Shopify platform before, but never anything at this scale. Any additional advice you can provide would also be appreciated. For instance, my client would also like to include a link to a video streaming service that is tied to a user's purchase, but this doesn't seem possible with the Digital Downloads app alone.

I have a ticket with Spotify where I go into additional detail that I can't post here due to confidentiality issues: 26095145

[PaulNewton]

@veloxenium If you are on shopify Plus you need to talk to your MSM asap about these specific capability concerns and options for a direction.

If not know that even upgrading to PLUS doesn't give new caps or something like that that can address this type of situation https://www.shopify.com/plus/upgrade?ref=paulnewton( I am a partner affiliate)

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@veloxenium wrote:

1. How many concurrent downloads of a large file (5-10GB+) the Shopify platform can handle. If you can ballpark to the nearest 10,000, that'd be sufficient.

Landmines here , shopify is NOT a Media delivery service. So not only is concurrency a problem but also things like license keys and validation.

This also drastically changes once again if you need streaming and not just download. 

While Shopify's CDN, and online store channel, and checkout are all built to scale , handle stress under flash sales,popups,etc and do it worldwide, https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/scalable-ecommerce-platform , video is a beast and shopify is not youtube, or vimeo, or mega, etc.  

Shopify as a platform gives no guarantee of uptime, or provide a general service level agreement. See TOS 7. Limitation of Liability for more.

For critical use critical services that give you a guarantee in writing , not a SaSS designed to bring a baseline service to the masses.

So for basic website content shopify should have no problems handling 10's of thousands if not millions of pageviews and payment transactions for a store.

That said, to serve 100 terabytes of video concurrently you should seriously seek a dedicated service for media delivery that integrates with shopify or has an api to build that integration just letting shopify do what it does best ecommerce transactions.

Note: While you could try and be clever to save money and have shopify serve media up until a possible failure mode then fallback to larger service that's not something I'd recommend as that increases the risk it's side effects makes the storefront choke as well trying to serve 100 terabytes of video.

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@veloxenium wrote:

1. ...
2. If the official Shopify Digital Downloads app is the right solution for this job.

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Whenever you are in any ecosystem and you see such a feature,extension,plugin,app, etc remember it is built to the least common denominator , it is purposefully simple only meant to get general use cases going not be mission critical software the provides all functionality to everyone. Such apps if they don't do X out of the box that situation is unlikley to be change.

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@veloxenium wrote:

For instance, my client would also like to include a link to a video streaming service that is tied to a user's purchase

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That is much simpler and sane, the locksmith app is the shopify go to for gating content. That could also be combined with a simple amazon aws storage scheme to manage files and costs.

There are also digital download apps like owlsend that have https://help.sendowl.com/help/codes-and-licenses and  self hosting options that might be a fit https://help.sendowl.com/help/self-hosting