October 12, 2007

DivShare Upgrades its One-stop shop Free File Hosting Service

Ouriel Ohayon

24 comments »

When it comes to decide where and how to host your files on the web you ask yourself two main questions: Are you ready to pay for it? What is the best service for a the type of file you need. File hosting/sharing is a totally crowded space with both vertical solutions (think Flickr or PhotoBucket for pictures, Scribd or SlideShare for documents, YouTube for videos) and horizontal solutions (RapidShare, MediaFire, YouSendit, Megaupload,…). Most of those services stop being free when you need extra space or extra bandwith. Honestly it is really hard to find out your way in the jungle. But if you are a heavy user or are only interested in hosting and controling sharing options you might want to consider a one-Stop shop like DivShare that has been here a for few months. They are starting to release today a series of innovations that will make the service more unique and attractive.

The whole service is now providing a one-stop solution that will save users the download process, whatever the format of the file is. They offer free unlimited hosting and convert to flash nearly every file type (audio, video, office documents,..) instantly upon uploading with embedding capabilities. This is different from a company like Wixi which is built around a social network and where files are indexed and shared. They have built a universal flash player that makes the access and viewing easy and save you the download process (here is an example).

They are also rolling out a new iPhone and Facebook application as well as an API as of next week. With the iPhone app you’ll be able to view and email easily all your documents. The Facebook application “Projects by DivShare” enables students to create a special wall to add and view documents within Facebook.

They will rollout on Tuesday an API that enables any site including social networks to outsource for their hosting capabilities for any kind of file. Divshare has a premium option that enables you to rebrand totally your player (see below an example). I am not sure what is the level of SLA guaranteed by DivShare but this is a ground explored already by Amazon with S3 and EC2. The difference being that DivShare will be free and will provide viewing capabilities. If you want to rebrand the appearance then you will have to pay and become a DivShare Direct customer.

You can argue that some of those features can be found here and there. And their new player looks a lot like the one Docstoc is offering (for office documents only). But the blend of features and the free unlimited hosting makes it a good option. Will they be able to keep that promise as the service grows specially with a model based on advertising only? Time will tell and the challenge will not be simple.

DivShare has been my personal favourite for a long time and those improvements will help me stick to my judgement. If you guys are blogger they have a great plug-in for file uploading and hosting too. They officially launched in December 06 have over three million monthly visitors worldwide, and 150,000 registered users. The company based in Cupertino, California, has only four employees and is self-funded but is planning to take outside funding.

CenterNetworks has an interview of the co-founder David Altschul back in February

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 2:19 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

DivShare - Best of the Free File Host? | The Web Hosting Show

March 23rd, 2008 at 10:06 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

FlyingMate

October 12th, 2007 at 3:16 am

Interesting!
And I found your mistake : EC3 -> EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
Allen Stern

October 12th, 2007 at 4:58 am

Great article Ouriel - thanks for the link as well. I like what divshare is doing - I hope articles like this get them some good publicity as I think some of the other services get more visibility across the net but aren’t as innovative and the customer service isn’t as good.
Steve Ballmer

October 12th, 2007 at 5:59 am

MS Cloud File Manager is on the way to show you people how this should be done!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
nonono

October 12th, 2007 at 6:50 am

Rapidshare and Megaupload are the only two sites that anyone should consider when it comes to store or share files. I tried divshare. They lost plenty of files. Their service was down several hours every week. During peak times you get 5kbps download speeds and the backend of their system is not capable of massive growth. Its Kindergarten hosting.
Billy

October 12th, 2007 at 7:00 am

I have RapidShare and they do not disappoint in terms of maintaining your files and delivering on top download speeds.
Ouriel Ohayon

October 12th, 2007 at 7:12 am

i like Rapidshare too but they only provide upload/download, not viewing/embedding and file management system.
Peter

October 12th, 2007 at 7:26 am

Divshare may be your favorite, but I have repeatedly tried many of the sites you mention over the past 2 years and I found the most reliable was easily sendspace.com. I love their upload/download tool - I have a Mac in work and they have a version for it too, even Linux. They even released an app for iPhone a few weeks ago, a world first - wish I had one of those!
filebam

October 12th, 2007 at 7:59 am

another addition might be http://www.filebam.com - its quiet similar to divshare but lacking the flash-applets.
Web

October 12th, 2007 at 8:35 am

Flash is just NOT a friendly format for viewing text and somewhat further degrades the quality of audio.

Perhaps members should be given the option of allowing everything to be transformed to Flash - or offered in their native formats
Fake Richard

October 12th, 2007 at 9:23 am

I have heard MSFT is getting into this as well.

http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
AnonTroll

October 12th, 2007 at 11:18 am

Cool service, upload was faster than expected, but playing the uploaded video is slooooow, perhaps it is due to the techcrunch effect and will smooth out later
Leandro Ardissone

October 12th, 2007 at 11:25 am

I’m using it since it launch and is really great.
It’s fully recommended.
Kevin

October 12th, 2007 at 1:38 pm

I have been using DivShare since the first day of its launch and have had very few problems with it. Any problems I did find were fixed almost immediately by their responsive support team. I have never had any files lost and no demand that I remove old files. All their updates have proved strong and worthwhile. I’ll be sticking by these guys, no question about it.

I’m very excited by all the great things happening the past few days. And while design isn’t everything, this is a great looking site, something that Rapidshare completely fails at. I can use this as a business tool, and not worry about showing my clients, because it preserves my logo/branding and keeps things clean.
jason carlin

October 12th, 2007 at 7:52 pm

Was this article written by Yoda?
Marco

October 12th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

Are there any alternatives? Scribd sucks since more than a week (my documents are still being converted it says!) DivShare is nice, but no real direct linking like imageshack for example…
Ouriel Ohayon

October 12th, 2007 at 11:23 pm

You have file linking in Divshare
Asad

October 13th, 2007 at 12:19 am

I agree that Divshare is a great system, but its great in its design, not its backend. Ive grown tired of waiting for files to upload because of the slow speed, for the power uploader to literally take a minute or two to load, for uploaded files to fail showing up in my dashboard. This has been an ongoing problem and its a regular gripe fest on each of their blog posts by their users that these issues need to be addressed but haven’t. I sure hope they fix these, cause they have lost lots of potential business due to these issues.
Marco

October 13th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

Ouriel,

oh yes, you are right. But, more complicated than other services, (e.g. I manually need to strip out the code for the full size image… )
James

October 15th, 2007 at 8:19 am

Ouriel - Do you know of a service that allows for unlimited downloads of several of my files? Rapidshare and others only allow each downloading user to download a certain amount of data per session/day. It’s not unreasonable, but I’d like to be able to allow those users to get all of my numerous files in one sitting, rather than coming back over the course of several days to get them one by one. I’m willing to pay a little for this. Any suggestions? Besides the option of buying more space from my webhost + hosting the files myself. Thanks.
Ouriel Ohayon

October 15th, 2007 at 8:21 am

James > Divshare….
James

October 15th, 2007 at 8:31 am

Oh. Oops. Pardon me if I missed that info in your article - I couldn’t find the info on Divshare’s site. I also just found that MediaFire does what I want, for free, but with a 100mb-per-file limit. They say they are planning a for-pay premium account for Q3 2007 that will have no filesize limits.
Peter Scully

October 22nd, 2007 at 9:53 am

I have to agree about Divshare failing to live up to expectations. The site has been up for more than a year (I think) and they still have no support for download managers - although this was promised 6 months ago.
I think Rapidshare are excellent. And I’ve also just discovered Filefactory, which seems to have a brilliant service. Much much much more efficient that DivShare. It’s very fast and - so far - extremely reliable.
Divshare do have a lot of bells and whistles, but who cares if the speeds are so slooow and the downtimes are increasing?
DivShare

November 2nd, 2007 at 3:51 pm

The Divshare experience is so poor that I would not consider using them. To anybody who wishes to entrust theirn files with them, read the DivShare Blog. Problems abound.