Byte Range Requests / Byte Serving

Byte Range Requests allow partial content requests, which is especially useful for large media files when it is desired to download only a specific portion of the file, or to continue downloading a file from where it left off after a download was interrupted.  It also allows multihomed clients to download a file over more than one connection simultaneously.

Apple made an announcement that servers streaming podcasts to iTunes must now have Byte-Range requests enabled, and many other companies and applications use this feature as well.

Byte Range Requests Availability

Linux Hosting - Enabled

Apache has Byte Range Requests enabled by default and it is enabled on all our Linux Hosting options, including Shared, Reseller, SEO Hosting, VPS & Linux Dedicated Servers.

Windows Hosting

Byte Range Requests can be enabled on a Windows Dedicated Server, but are not available on Windows Shared Hosting.

How to Check if Byte Requests is Enabled

The following quick PHP script can be used to verify that byte range requests is turned on:

<?php
$range = '60-120';
$host = "yourdomain.tld";
$socket = fsockopen($host,80);
$packet = "GET /some-static-file.txt HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:
$host\r\nRange:bytes=$range\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip\r\nConnection:
close\r\n\r\n";
fwrite($socket,$packet);
echo fread($socket,2048);
?> 

You will need to edit this to include your domain (instead of yourdomain.tld) and upload a static file on your account called some-static-file.txt in the same directory as the PHP script.