The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 30. File Hosting

There may be times when you want to send a large file to someone, but it's too large to be sent via e-mail (I would generally discourage sending files larger than 5 megabytes via e-mail).

If you have your own web server, you can upload it and have the intended recipient download it from there. But if not, you can use one of these file hosting sites.

These are especially good if you want several people to download the files. Naturally you can password-protect the files so that the only people who can access them are those authorized by you.

These can also be used for quick-and-dirty off-site storage of your most important backup files.

http://www.sendmefile.com/howto.htm

http://www.box.net/

http://www.filesanywhere.com/

http://fileburst.com/

http://www.filesdirect.com/

http://yousendit.com/

http://www.dropload.com/

http://www.fileflow.com/

http://aws.amazon.com/ (click on "Simple Storage Service")

The last link in the preceding list is for Amazon's "Simple Storage Service" (S3), which can be used for simple file storage but is designed to do a lot more than that. S3 allows you to off-load bandwidth-intensive content from your server to Amazon's servers. This helps you reduce the load on your own server while at the same time helping you avoid bandwidth overage charges.

Because you're using Amazon's servers, your bandwidth scaling is virtually unlimited—so if you're expecting a great deal of traffic for a particular promotion, this can save you from the embarrassment ...