Why do downloads in some websites start “in a couple of seconds”?
In: Technology
A few reasons.
1. They can use technologies to help avoid drive-bys, or people essentially sharing the link to just the actual download, and not the host site.
2. They could be serving it from a content delivery network, which could legitimately take a small amount of time to find the best one for you to download from.
3. It gives the user a chance to leave before the download starts if they didn’t intend to download it, which also saves the host bandwidth.
Usually it’s so they can control the flow of traffic to and from their server so the site doesn’t crash from too many connections at the same time.
Generally landing pages like that either have some other kind of information on them, or they have ads on them. Impressions on the ads matter for these sites for their revenue.
In addition to the other (correct) answers, there’s one additional one: Some download sites have a ‘premium’ download option which you pay for. To make it tempting, they deliberately delay and throttle their free downloads, often by massive amounts.
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