How to Host Files for Free with Google!

[qbradq]

It's a real shame when the community looses some valuable resource because the host it was on goes down. People, please consider hosting your files on a service like Google Sites. It's free! Limits are 20mb per file, 100mb per site. But as far as I can tell, you can have as many sites as you want.

[tepples]

Google dropped Pages (in favor of Sites), and it dropped binary hosting from Code. It dropped Video (in favor of YouTube) and XMPP Talk (in favor of Hangouts), and it's in the process of dropping Reader and iGoogle. What makes you think it won't soon drop this feature of Sites?

[Hamtaro126]

And because of the plans to kill Google Reader, Some good but obscure MLP fanfics I have in my favorites will die with it...

How sad!!!

[zzo38]

I just host files on my own computer.

[tepples]

And because of the plans to kill Google Reader, Some good but obscure MLP fanfics I have in my favorites will die with it...

You can extract your Google Reader favorites and load them into an RSS reader that runs on your own PC. It's a bit more complicated with file hosting, as making something available 24/7 is slightly more expensive.

zzo38: Not everybody has a PC to leave on 24/7 as a home web server. Nor does everybody have a home Internet connection that allows a web server. Some people have only a NAT IP with no way to forward ports 443 and 80. And even people who have their own dynamic IP may be on an ISP plan that doesn't allow hosting "servers".

[qbradq]

When Google drops products they typically give a long lead time for you to get your data off. If you're still active and care about what you're hosting, you can move it somewhere else. If you're long gone we'll at least have the data around for a while afterwards.

When hosting your own site it's gone pretty much as soon as you stop caring, and there's rarely any lead time for the community to recover and mirror the data.

I'm not saying Google Sites is the 100 year solution, just that it's a far better solution that hosting your own site as far as posterity is concerned.

[Zelex]

Check out Wuala. Free cloud storage.

[infiniteneslives]

Dropbox is crazy simple to maintain and update what you're sharing. They also give 2GB of free storage to start. Not sure how they handle 'inactive' accounts though...

Even if you don't use it for hosting files it's crazy simple version control of anything as it saves every version of any file for later restoration without you having to think twice about it. If a version was ever saved to a folder on your PC's dropbox folder there's a copy of it available to you on the net. I've used it countless times to restore files I've broken and had to take hours/days/weeks/months steps back to get to a working state again. SVN and stuff is great, but you actually have to think about your desire to commit in a copy. You're required to save before compiling, thus you're guaranteed a copy of every version you've ever had when it's all in dropbox.

[Kasumi]

... I remember just helping someone find something from a googlepages website that went down. (Though it's possible it was the owner who removed it.)

[Bregalad]

Knowing the lack of respect for private life and personal information of Google, I'd pass this one, thanks.

[mikejmoffitt]

Knowing the lack of respect for private life and personal information of Google, I'd pass this one, thanks.

This. That, and if data becomes unavailable because the hoster has stopped caring / paying attention, I doubt the same hoster would bother to get his/her data for when Sites goes down / gets changed in some way that inhibits use of the data.

[3gengames]

Google drive is much better for just files. That's what I use, I doubt it'd be removed ever.

Also, not trusting google but trusting your gov't with your info? I'd give it all to google...as long as they don't sell it, which they don't. Paranoia FTL.

[Near]

Google dropped Pages (in favor of Sites), and it dropped binary hosting from Code. It dropped Video (in favor of YouTube) and XMPP Talk (in favor of Hangouts), and it's in the process of dropping Reader and iGoogle. What makes you think it won't soon drop this feature of Sites?

The company is completely and utterly unreliable and untrustworthy.

Their own constant killing of their very projects undermines their efforts to push for web apps. It's a damn case study on why you should never rely on web apps for any serious personal use or for business: you never know when the company will just arbitrarily decide to kill what you've come to rely on.

Whereas I am still rocking Hex Workshop 2.54, which I downloaded in 1998.

[zzo38]

I don't like web apps either.

[qbradq]

Yea, I didn't really intend or foresee this discussion