Cloudshare
Cloudshare is a powerful, simple, and beautiful file hosting service for your site’s visitors.
Features
- Very lightweight code.
- Highly customizable.
- Beautiful interface. One of a kind design. Impress your visitors!
- Give your users the option of a paid plan / Pro account. Help pay for bandwidth, and make a bit of money for yourself, too!
- Very little knowledge of PHP / JS / HTML needed. Just upload and run.
- Uses the power of HTML5 , Flash, or Silverlight depending on which technology works best on your system.
How to setup the script on your server.
Installation
- If you want the script in its own folder, simply upload the folder “cloudshare” to your server.
- If you want the script on the root of the domain, simply upload the contents of the “cloudshare” folder to the root of your domain
- Place the file CROSSDOMAIN .XML into the root of your domain for example: http://example.com/crossdomain.xml
- Or if on a subdomain: http://sub.example.com/crossdomain.xml
- CHMOD the folder “upload”, located in the “cloudshare” folder to 777.
- Go to your script on the live server you have just uploaded to, and try out the “free service”. N.B: Tar GZ, or tar.gz files only. If you don’t know what this file is; just rename a file to have the extension of tar.gz. For example Picture.jpg gets renamed to pic.tar.gz
- If everything works fine, you can then proceed to setup your first Pro account, which will be used for testing purposes only.
A few notes about Pro accounts
Pro Account Brief
You may have realized the free version is very limited. This is to stop lots of users abusing the file host service, and eating up all your server’s bandwidth. Paid users, or “Pro” users have a lot more freedom, and help you purchase more bandwidth to fulfill their needs.
The following file-types are allowed on a Pro Plan>
- zip ,rar ,jpg ,bmp ,gif ,png ,txt ,html ,txt ,mp3 ,wav ,flac ,wmv ,wma ,mp4 ,mov ,psd ,css
The following file-type is allowed on the “Free Plan”: tar.gz
- In order to handle payments, I would recommend using a service called Gumroad www.gumroad.com
- Here is their FAQ
I have searched around and they seem to be the best for this particular service, as users typically want something easy and not as complicated as PayPal. Although you can use PayPal to handle transactions if you want 
In the link above the Cloudshare free user page / main page, you will notice a link called “GET PRO ”. Here you will be replacing the “href” attribute of the link to a Gumroad item for sale. You could call the ITEM “1 year Cloudshare subscription”, or whatever you want on the Gumroad admin page, or if you’re inclined to use PayPal, this could simply be a donate link.
Now that you have setup a payment system, you can start to setup your first “Pro Account” …
Setting up your first Pro account
Pro Accounts
You might want to see how the Pro account works, so for your convenience, there is a pre-made Pro account ready to be tested by you, the Cloudshare Admin. The folder is called “user0000”, and typically that is what a user will see when he/she pays for a Pro account. So for example, the first payment you receive for a pro account may be called user0001, and the second will be user0002, etc. These are folders unique to that particular user only, and may not be used by any other user, apart from yourself, of course. To test the dummy Pro account navigate to the user0000 folder on your server E.G:
http://server.com/cloudshare/user0000/
Upon receiving payment:
- User pays through Gumroad for 1 year subscription
- You, the Admim, creates a duplicate copy of the folder user0000, and renames it my-id-0001-user.
- This foldername must be UNIQUE to stop other users who know about the script from accessing folder / hacking the folder’s location
- E.G: /my-id-0001-user/ ? Make this foldername unique so nobody can guess it.
- You MUST CHMOD the “uploads” folder in here to 777.
- You, the Admin notifies the paying user of the newly created folder. This must be the full path to the folder created, e.g:
http://example.com/cloudshare/my-id-0001-user/ - Typically an email address is given when you receive payment; so you will be sending the notification there.
- User visits the URL you just sent to him/her
- You look inside the “ips.html” file to see the users IP, and you thus confirm he/she has visited the URL
- More on the ips.html file here:
The file ips.html exists in the Pro account folder, ie /user0001/ips.html This is basically a log of IPs / unique computers / visitors who have seen the Pro Account folder. The purpose of this file is to block other users from visiting the folder, aswell as confirming the customer has actually seen the folder. (They may try to scam you and say they didn’t get your link). The ips.html mechanism also stops the paying user from sharing his/her Pro Account with others. If the amount of IPs accessing the folder amounts to a number greater than 3, the folder will be locked down, and the user will see the following message:
“Too many IPs have accessed this page. Please contact the Admin to re-instate your account.”
** Make sure ips.html is writeable by the server, i.e: CHMOD it to 777
Important notes on using this script.
Notes
- The Twitter support page can be changed to your Twitter Username, so you can converse back and forth to your customers
- As mentioned before, the following extensions are allowed for a PRO account.:
zip ,rar ,jpg ,bmp ,gif ,png ,txt ,html ,txt ,mp3 ,wav ,flac ,wmv ,wma ,mp4 ,mov ,psd ,css
To change these go to line 136 of pro.html, located in the user’s PRO folder, and edit the extensions there. (You may want to limit what file-types a paying user can upload) - A user can see what items he/she uploaded by visiting the ‘uploads’ folder in his/her Pro folder, e.g:
http://example.com/cloudshare/userA1031/uploads/ ? This link is visible on the page when the user navigates to:
http://example.com/cloudshare/userA1031/ - You might want to include a terms of service page located both in the PRO account page, and the main (free user) landing page. This is up to you. Some users may decide to abuse your service and upload questionable material.
- I have set a fixed price on the main page / landing page of this script ( $25.00 / year ). Feel free to modify this and change it to whatever you see fit. If you expect a lot of traffic on your site, and you know it’s going to be costly; you might want to ramp this up to $40.00, or in some rare cases when you have over 5000 users – $50.00; enough to cover the hosting and bandiwdht costs of most servers.
This is what a Pro account page looks like:
Free support for anyone who purchases
Support
This script was made by TheArchivist. Free support is included upon purchase of the script.