WooCommerce & Amazon S3 – Digital Download – Download Failing

I have been searching for hours for resolution on this subject, without any resolve. I see many people have similar questions, but there are little solutions out there. I’m going to get specific so we can bust this issue once and for all.

*note: I am not using the Amazon S3 Downloads Plug-In for WordPress. I am doing everything native.

Objective: to have large video files (2-6GB+) that are hosted on Amazon S3 be downloaded via my wordpress site using WooCommerce.

Problem: users are capable of starting the download, but the download is stopping before complete and when users try to unzip file, they either get “access denied” or “unable to unzip” errors.

WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Downloadable Products > File Download Method > was originally set to “Force Downloads”
Downloads Require Login: Yes
Grant Access to Downloadable Products After Payment: Yes

Using these settings, the “bucket URL code” was inserted into the URL for the Product Download in WooCommerce.

Users were experiencing some kind of time out, where the downloads were not completing, but they wouldn’t not tell the user that. The download would simply stop and people would think they had the full .zip. It would get to about 2-3GB then end. Some people are able to download partial .zip files that only have a couple of the videos in the folder, while for others the .zip would just not open at all. “Unable to Unzip” errors.

First Fix Attempt I noticed that if I sent someone the direct URL from the Amazon S3 > All Buckets > “File” > Properties > Link “https://s3.amazonaws.com/…” the download would work fine, no problems. So rather than using the “bucket URL code” as the URL, I simply switched to using the direct URL code from this Link for my product download. I also added “Grantee: Everyone” in the “Permissions” section of Amazon S3 for that particular download.

This resulted in the same problem.

Second Fix Attempt I switched the “File Download Method” from Force Downloads to “Redirect Only”

This also resulted in the same problem for users.

The strangest thing about all of this is that when I try downloading these items myself, the downloads complete and unzip fine. So I am not experiencing this error on my end. But when anyone else tries, it 100% of the time fails.

This problem has perplexed me. Can anyone out there help?