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 ?

Related posts

• Tinyload Upload to Multiple Sites at Once (3)
• Is It Reasonable To Offer 1 Terabyte of Storage As A File Hoster? (5)
• Dropbox Review and Invites (61)
• Drop.io great file hoster (5)
• Windows Tip: Don’t replace any files while copying (10)

The free version makes it possible to share files of up to 1 gigabyte in size. Pando offers commercial upgrades for file sizes of up to 50 gigabytes. The Pando client can be downloaded for Windows and Macintosh while Linux users will have to use a Pando beta client that was only mentioned in the forums.

Packages expire after a certain period of time with no downloads. That time is seven days for email / im packages in the free version and unlimited for the biggest commercial version

Integrating Pando downloads in your websites is another great feature. Users can click on a Pando link and download it using the Pando client. The only drawback of this method is that those downloads expire after 30 days of inactivity. Only the Publisher package, the biggest commercial package keeps the files for an unlimited time on their servers.

Here is a short list of the differences of the free and commercial versions of Pando:

• Free (max file size 1 gigabyte, expires after 7 days [email / im] and 30 days [webdownloads]
• Pando Plus (max file size 3 gigabytes, expires after 30 days [email / im / webdownloads, $4.95 per month, $49,95 per year)
• Pando Pro (max file size 5 gigabytes, expires after 30 days [email / im / webdownloads], faster downloads for recipients, $19.95 per month, $199,95 per year)
• Pando Publisher (max file size 50 gigabytes, never expires fastest downloads for recipients, $49.95 per month, $499,95 per year)

Related posts

• Youtorrent (2)
• Yahoo Mail Integrates Drop.io To Support 100 Megabyte Attachments (8)
• Why some ISPs turn against their own customers (5)
• Why I wont be using Qtrax (7)
• What’s Your Take on Downloading? (17)