For a few months, MediaFire, i thought was the best free hosting/file sharing web service was unavailable from israel. Impossible to find why and get an answer from them.
It pushed me to explore for alternatives. I discovered in the meantime DivShare. This is the rolls. don’t think twice. This is the best. In addition of free hosting and great interface you can upload files up to 200MB and get free player for your podcasts for exemple (see below with one of my previous podcast).
MediaFire is back now but too late. Sorry, you just lost a customer.
The question i am always asking myself with those services is : say you share/host files there, what happens the day most of those services will close (and they will)? could a competitive advantage be the guarantee your files will be always available EVEN if the company no longers exist?
Very good question.
Some people are serious about their files, and they might like this argument.
Another way to see it is to bet on a reassuring third party.
Example : "We host on Amazon S3, so if we close we could leave your files on S3 and transfer them to your own S3 account - you do what you want from there".
In this case Amazon is used to guarantee a kind of "data escrow" don't you think?
Posted by: Louis Choquel | 03 February 2007 at 11:08 PM
Louis, this is a brilliant argument.
Posted by: ouriel | 04 February 2007 at 09:41 AM
Ouriel writes: "...The question i am always asking myself with those services is : say you share/host files there, what happens the day most of those services will close (and they will)? could a competitive advantage be the guarantee your files will be always available EVEN if the company no longers exist?..."
That's the key question. As of today, no company can provide a life insurance for free, because the cost of maintaining such amount of data (thousands of terabytes of data) is uncceptable, both for providers and for users. The only way to address that question is to make huge progress on data compression technology, and reduce the cost of storage. This is the story that FOLDEST is involved in.
Posted by: Richard Salabi | 05 February 2007 at 05:24 PM