We have a DS920+ at church. I want to offer a PDF download to the congregation by providing a link in the bulletin and on the website and church app, and then count the number of downloads so I can pay the creator by the number of downloads. The free version of C2 Transfer requires sending an invite to each email address so that will not work. I can offer a link to my Google Drive but so far cannot figure out how to count the downloads. Is there a package I can install on my NAS that will let me do that? Thank you for any advice.
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If your church has a website you can create a new download page on that website and put a pdf link on it. Then, you can track pdf downloads using the site’s cPanel. You would need to coordinate with the website’s admin.
He’s correct. The websites cPANEL will show the download counts. Even the IP address if you want.
Thanks, guys. Our website is hosted on (and created using the tools of) Subsplash. It’s great for churches because of the all inclusive products (website, phone apps, Roku and Apple TV apps, CMS, Giving, etc.) and has saved us a lot of money. However, they lack some features. Our email is hosted by another provider. I may be able to track downloads on the website by using Google Analytics.
What I have discovered, thanks to another forum, is ProjectSend. Using Mariushosting.com’s guides I have installed it on my personal NAS and have successfully counted test downloads. I believe this is going to work on our church NAS, but am still messing with the configuration. (One of my testers just gets a blank page, so I need to find out what he is doing differently from the others.)
ProjectSend setup took me an hour or so, and I found this easier than the last time I used Google Analytics when we had a WordPress site instead of a Subsplash site.
Thanks for your suggestions. I did not know I could track downloads through cPanel. I just don’t have access to it on Subsplash. I need to check my cPanel on my personal site to learn how that is done.
Glad to see you found a solution. Marius Hosting is very good resource to learn how to implement various services on a Synology NAS. He relys on donations to maintain his website.
cPanel is a utility that a web hosting service gives access to website administrators through their admin accounts. There is usually a section called “metrics” where the webmaster can analyze who’s coming to the website, what country they’re from, how often and how long they stay, etc. There is a utility called Awstat that lets you see how often a webpage is visited, how often a file is downloaded lots of other stats (ad nauseum).
I would be surprised if Subsplash doesn’t give your church’s website admin access to it. Awstats is a good way to see how people interact with your website and let’s you know what pages are popular and which never get visited.
Wait you pay the creator by the download?
Subsplash uses their own website page builder (sort of like Wix, but much better). We don’t have access to cPanel as one would normally have in a WordPress site. We tried Wix (too hard to make the mobile site match), then at my urging WordPress. We used Google Analytics to count downloads. It was working well until our team leader visited a church using Subsplash and discovered how many services they provide in addition to a website. We moved to Subsplash and were able to drop the payments to 6 or 8 (I forget) other companies for services we get free with Subsplash. Our church saved about $6000 the first year. Perhaps the best feature is the free mobile app we get with the package. It is simple to keep updated. The only disadvantage we have found so far is we cannot provide downloads from the app, only website, and they do not provide a way to count the downloads from the website unless we figure out Google Analytics v4, which I have no desire to get into. So using ProjectSend on our NAS will be great.
Hi Alex, yes, we pay a company for the right to provide our congregation their prayer guide. We buy a package, then monitor how many of them are downloaded. If we give out more than the number we paid for we send them payment for the remainder after we take the link off our site. Each year we do this we get a different number of visitors downloading the prayer guide. Last year, when we could not figure out how to count the downloads we just paid for double our average count. So this is going to be better.