A few of months ago, we started a free web hosting service. It has attracted lots of users.

I am interested in using mod_rewrite so that when someone clicks on a link to a multimedia file, they get a page with a "Click here to download the file" link.

This will give us an opportunity to put some ads on that page, and hopefully make some money from the bandwidth we are giving away for free.

Thanks for any help!

have a look for amazon s3 web service (http://aws.amazon.com/s3)

you'll have your files there, and let people downloading files use amazon's bandwidth.

otherwise, you may send mimetype audio/x-mp3 to pop-up a "download" window of your visitor's browser. it's not a mod_rewrite issue.