What is the best way to share large files

I see a lot of file hosting recommendations lately for files that are larger than 1 Gigabyte and I was always wondering why the writers thought that this was the best way to share those files. Uploading large files to a file hoster has several advantages - but also disadvantages - which I would outline in the following paragraphs.

The advantages can be outlined the following way: The root user who is sending the file only needs to upload it once and makes it available to all other users that receive the link to the download from him (if the file hoster supports that of course). Downloads are normally a lot faster when the recipients download the files from a file hoster and not the user who wants to seed them.

Disadvantages however outweigh the advantages in my opinion. First of all there are privacy issues. I would not upload personal files to a third party website even if they are password protected. It happened in the past that file hosters took their websites down because they miscalculated the traffic costs and possible earnings which meant that all files hosted there were.. gone.

They usually have a time or download limit and remove files after that limit has been reached. Uploading a 1 Gigabyte movie of your latest holidays takes some time and it would not be nice if not all of the recipients where able to download the file in time. Nothings better than uploading the file again, eh ? Wrong !

There are several ways to share large files that are more reliable. The first, and really the best way that I can think of, is to simply burn the files to CD or DVD and hand them to the person who wants them. If he is far away you could send them to him. The advantage of this method is that you do not have to upload or download files to share them.

Another option would be to upload the files to your own webspace. I have a dedicated server that has 320 Gigabytes of space and it would take a few seconds to create a new directory and a ftp account on that server. This would mean that you have to upload the file once but it would stay there for as long as you want and there would not obviously be privacy concerns.

Offering the files as torrents is another possibility. This is a great method if you got a lot of recipients. Sharing takes longer however and you will upload more Gigabytes this way. Still, no privacy concerns and the possibility to stop and start seeding the torrent at will are positive arguments.

My favorite way is to burn them on disk followed by my own upload spot on my dedicated server. I don’t like using file hosts at all.

How are you spreading large files ?