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Where and how can I host an EXE file (basically an installer for our desktop product) for users to download (e.g. for trial)?

My company uses Google Apps for nearly everything (at least for now). We have our website on Google Sites. Google Sites does not allow uploading an EXE directly, we need to zip it up and upload it, to host the installer EXE on the website itself. While this is a fine alternative I wonder if there is a way to upload an EXE directly to a hosting service that we can link to on our website. We tried to upload the EXE to Google Docs (as it can host any file-type now), but the user experience is poor, since it redirects the user to a http://docs.google.com page that informs user that the file was not scanned and may contain viruses and asked if they wanted to download anyway.

Some nice to have functionality:

  • It would be nice to allow linking to the EXE from the company URL e.g. http://my-company-url.com/installer.EXE
  • It would be nice if an online hosting service provided this. I know I can install a Linux+Apache on our own physical server and serve content, but I would rather not go this route, as I can upload the .ZIP of the EXE to Google Sites
  • It would be nice if the hosting service was cheap (free if possible) if only a small number of downloads were initiated.
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You can store your file on Dropbox and link your file. There are download limits for users but these seem high enough (10GB/day for free users, 250GB/day for paid users).

There are also numerous other file hosting services (sort for Direct access).

This will not give you an URL from your domain, however you can create a 301 redirect (this script may need to be tweaked a bit but you get the basic idea). This should work for all other hosting services, too.

Another possibility is to store the files on Amazon S3 which is paid only (cheap enough and you pay only if users download (and a tiny bit for storage, click on S3 to calculate)) but can give you a subdomain on your own domain and has a higher rate of stability than most file hosting services (which can be switched of from one day to another).

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  • thanks for the answer. If I do choose Amazon s3 any suggestions on how to setup a subdomain and provide a direct access to the file? Or are those pieces of information easily answered by a Google search?
    – ossandcad
    Commented Jun 19, 2011 at 17:33
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    @ossandcad See stackoverflow.com/questions/5043616/… You just have to create a bucket inside Amazon S3 with the name of your subdomain and point a CNAME record in your DNS to it. All files inside this bucket will be automatically accessible by their respective URL. Feel free to ask any question you have on this or the partner sites.
    – neo
    Commented Jun 19, 2011 at 19:30
  • @neo, Not exactly a straightforward process.
    – Pacerier
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 8:35

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