Hosting audio, video or text files publicly is what archive.org is for. But what if you want to share to a more limited audience, like a few friends, or some lad you have to send a bunch of files to so he can do some mastering on it for an awesome project you’re doing?
Well, mediafire.com is pretty damn suited for stuff like that. It’s not just a file hosting site like there are a ton out there. It looks the same at first, and you can use it for the odd anonymous upload like the others, but you can also create a free account there, and unlock some nifty new features. Here’s what you can do with it:
- Host files up to 100 MB. If your files are bigger (and mine where) you can use 7zip to split them up into 100MB parts, and upload those
- Unlimited disk space. Sounds kick ass doesn’t it? Here it goes again: Unlimited disk space!! Rad.
- With an account, you can manage your shared files. Create folders, share folders, delete files/folders etc.
- Link and embed code is generated for you. You only have to copy paste it. There’s even a button to that just that for you. I mean, really, they can’t make it any easier than that.
- Your files do not get deleted after a certain period of inactiviy. They simply don’t get deleted automatically, so you don’ t need to bother with links timing out after a few weeks.
- Embed your files on your own site. If you’re short on webspace and embed some video on your blog, myspace or whatever, this might be just what you are looking for.
- Add descriptions and tags to your files. Tags are still hip right? Well, they support it.
- Unshare files, making them only available to yourself again. Like when you fucked up and hosted some pictures that shouldn’t have been seen by the world, and certainly not the entire internet. Whoops.
- No obnoxious ads for your downloaders, and none for you either. Ads are there, but they are subtle. I like that. The other file hosting services screw up bigtime in that department.
- Photo Gallery view. Now I’d recommend Flickr to host your photo’s of course, but this isn’t bad either. As I said, no limitations here, and pictures get automatically resized into thumbs and smaller views to keep it easy on the low bandwidth downloader. You can see an example here of some silly TV screenshots I took. You’ll have to click the Photo Gallery link on the top right.
So I guess mediafire doesn’t suck. Sometimes you have to upload things twice though, as it goofs up somewhere in the upload process. For small files that ain’t too bad, but for huge ones it really sucks. But hey, it’s free remember, so it’s still pretty darn cool to be able to manage and share files for free like this.