brandondawson.org Drupal Website Developer and Consultant

Does “File Hosting” *really* belong to “the cloud”?

I was downloading a series of free add-ons for a particular piece of software, when I was forced into downloading it from one of those "file hosting" services. This got me thinking, because it was mildly annoying to have to use such a service for a file that was only 1.8 megabytes in size, after a sixty-second wait due to my not being a "Premium" member.

Of course, hosts like RapidHost and their kind derive a large amount of their traffic from, shall we say, less than fully legal data. But to see something that was 100% legal, and 100% free, being offered on such a service....well, suffice it to say I spent the 60 seconds thinking, I hope, somewhat productively.

Because this is a market that "old-school" traditional web hosts can handle, as well. The people putting files like these on download services do not need privacy; in my specific case, they actually had it linked from their online profile. And they probably have an account on that service, which means they're willing to pay for the service.

They just don't want the hassle of a yearly domain registration, and they don't want to have to fuss with FTP. That's all; nothing more. They're not seeking these "cloud" services because of cost, or because of bandwidth concerns, they're seeking them out of sheer convenience. They want to be able to upload their content in seconds, through an easy web interface.

For these customers, then, offering a "custom-branded" way to upload legal content and link back to it easily seems like a natural case of "need meets market". As web hosts, we can offer custom-branded subdomains very easily; it costs us next-to-nothing at that level. And there's a lot of different ways to approach the revenue question, as well.

(To say nothing of the way the pseudo-custom-branding a subdomain could provide beats the hell out of the mysterious file hashes one sees at a file dump.)

Hell, even "darling of the moment" services like DropBox would seem to be prone to this strategy.

Seems to me there's a market opportunity here, and an easy win for traditional web hosts against the spectre of "the cloud". I'll be registering my domain for it shortly. Will you?