Have you ever wanted to send, receive or just store a giant file? We are talking about in the range of gigs. Free file hosting servers tend to have a max of 200mb of file hosting. These companies also have short expiration dates on files that they host deleting them after just 30 days. So how can you get long lasting large files hosted for free for extended periods of time?
First you want to determine what you want. There isn’t really one web page that will satisfy all your needs but some are better than others. I have two web pages that I love and always fall back to my hosting needs. Mediafire.com and divshare.com, these web pages have different positive sides and negative ones to them.
My web page of choice is www.mediafire.com, this is a great web page that lets you upload as many files of any size less than 200mb. Its a very easy to navigate the web page and the sign-up is quick and painless. The only problem with this web page is that if you don’t log in after a certain number of days you will get an email saying you will need to log-in in a certain amount of time or all your files will be deleted. After receiving this email if you log-in, in the time you were given your files will still have been deleted, but will be returned after a few hours (this might even take a few days). The time mediafire gives you to log-in before sending the email and after sending the email is unique to your account. Accounts that take up more of their servers memory will have less time seeing as they are the bigger leeches.
Another amazing web page I found is www.divshare.com. Unlike mediafire your files will never be at risk of being deleted. The down side to this web page is it has a maximum file size of 200mb, (just like mediafire) but also a total upload upload size of 5gigs. This means that if you upload so many files, even if all are under 200mb, that they add up to 5gigs you cannot upload any more.
So, now you know were to go, but you’re still asking yourself how to get free unlimited file size hosting, both web pages I just listed have a 200mb file max. You could sign up for unlimited service and pay for unlimited or cheat the system. First off, you’ll need to get winrar and its free, so go do that. You can get it here: http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm. Once you install winrar, right-click on the file and choose “Add to archive…”. A menu will pop up, all you need to concentrate on is the text box labeled “Split to volumes, bytes”. 1mb is 1,000,00 bytes so 200mb is 200,000,000, in the text box enter this number and the resulting zip files that will be created will be a max of 200mb. For every gig your file is there will be 5 zips that will be created (acutely between 5 and 6, not really important just a detail) so if your file is several gigs you might not want to do it on your desktop to keep things better organized. After the compression is complete just upload them to the file host and you’re done.
If you or some one else wish to unzip the file again, winrar will be needed and if any of the parts of the file are missing you will get an error saying “You need to have the following volume to continue extraction:” and it will list the part you need.
A really quick a work around for divshare.com to get around the 5gig total max is simply to crate a new profile, all you need is an email and you can get new emails for free at www.mail.com. But that’s a pain so I just stick to mediafire.
