Fifteen years ago my access to the internet was via 28.8K dialup modem, and I was happy to have switched from AOL to a real ISP that didn’t charge by the minute for making use of it. I was issued one free email address with my account. And they also tossed in 2 MB of free online storage space, which I could use to upload HTML pages and thereby have my own web site. I could FTP files up there of other sorts as well —— for example, image files to illustrate a point I was making on some message board.
Nowadays my access to the internet is zippy-fast broadband, my ISP has long since offered me, if not quite an unlimited number of email addresses, at least a decent packet of auxiliary email accounts (and besides, there are at least a half-dozen well-established TOTALLY FREE email services you can just sign up for). But I’m still stuck with tiny little limited FTP and HTTP accessible online storage space.
I don’t want to pay some huge honking fee to some hosting company that expects me to give a rat’s ass about my own domain name, web design services, server-side CGI scripting, large commercial-sized bandwidth allowances, search engine ranking placement, or pretty key fobs for my keychain. I’m hoping for somewhere between free and very cheap, something in the vicinity of half a gig of storage space (but even 50 MB would be a vast improvement) that I can FTP files up to and whereby each such file can have a HTTP URL so I can link to it in emails or message board posts. Anyone got a recommendation?
Dropbox allows creating public links to files, its not ftp , syncs to a folder on your computer. IIRC you can even update that file and as long as the filename does not change, the link still works.
It’s not FTP, just a file sharing/syncing cloud-based service.
It’s an app you install on your machine, and keeps a structure of synced folders on your system. Create a new folder, drop a file in it, and it uploads the file to the DropBox “cloud.” Likewise, other DropBox users can subscribe to your shared folders, which will create a mirrored shared folder and files on their computer, all syncing on the fly between computers.
You can also upgrade for more space, but it’s not FTP, and can’t host images and files for websites/domains, AFAIK.
Saw this thread and decided to try Skydrive. Seems to work well, you can upload anything you want and share them. Not FTP but seems to be a very good alternative, it would solve the problem of explaining ftp software to non techy people. (like my mom) You just send a email with the link, when they get it they just click on the link to download. Doesn’t get much easier than that. It is FREE for 25 gigs. yes 25 gigs so the price is right as well.
Concur - Dropbox has a copy stored on their servers. You can log into another computer and get to your file from there via a browser, you can set up the client on another device (another computer, a phone, etc.) and the files are automatically synched, and as another poster noted you can make selected files publicly shareable.
2 Gig is free. You can “earn” more space by referring friends (you each get an extra quarter gig for each friend who signs up), and you can pay for more than that.
