1个同步下载+强制等待时间+ Amazon S3

Question

I must say this is the first time I ask anything here, and I'm not a developer, so please be patient with my lack of knownledge. This requirement is for a website I am creating with some friends, so it's not that I'm making money with this.

This is the problem: I want to implement some kind of restriction to downloads, very much in the same way Rapidshare or any other file sharing service does:

1. The user should be able to download only 1 file simultaneously

2. The user should wait before being able to download another file, let's say 2 hours.

However, I am not trying to create a file sharing website. I am going to upload all the files to Amazon S3, and the only thing I need is to be able to restrict the downloads. I will create the links to the files. I don't care if users are registered or not, they should be able to download anyway.

The website is built in Joomla!, which uses Apache + MySQL. The files would be located at Amazon's servers.

My question is the following. Is there any way to implement this in a not-so-extremely-complicated way? Do you know some script or web-service that could help me get this done?

I have looked around, but the only thing I've found are Payment gateways, and we don't plan to charge for downloads.

Any help will be much appreciated.

Thanks!

UPDATE: I solved this problem using this script: http://www.vibralogix.com/linklokurl/features.php

Answer 1

Only 2 ways comes to my mind - you either copy a file with unique hash and let apache serve it.. then you don't have any control over when user actually ends his download (or starts). Useful for big files. Another way is to pass it through php. Still, you would need to kill download session in case user stops download.