MediaFire: A new RapidShare?

MediaFire is a website which offers free file hosting & sharing services. Unlike most services, it does not require registration and doesn’t cap bandwidth, upload size, amounts of simultaneous downloads and uploads and doesn’t appear to have many, if any, adverts.

There are a few other file hosting & sharing services out there. These range from the Web 2.0 Box.net and Box.net lite, to Rapidshare (which I seem to have trouble downloading from) and MegaUpload.

Personally, I find Box.net a bit complex if you merely wish to share a file (although Box.net lite is much better), Rapidshare too restrictive (my IP can’t download from them, for example) and MegaUpload too ad-filled. All of these services are fast though, and the latter two offer some form of revenue sharing (which is somewhat ironic considering so much copyright law is breached on these sites).

MediaFire looks extremely Web 2.0, and is quite light compared to the vast majority of sites which offer similar services. MediaFire also seems pretty fast, I like the way it tells you how many Kbps you are achieving when you’re uploading (I’m currently getting about 210Kbps which is pretty impressive considering I’ve only got a 256Kbps uplink). The upload process, including the speedometer, is done through AJAX .

If you sign up for a free account, you get better management of your files. Although this is currently limited to the ability to seeing a list of your uploaded files and the ability to delete them, it would be nice to see the ability to count downloads. Also, MediaFire allows you to send files to Yahoo! IM or AIM buddies (but not MSN or Gtalk).

An example of a file I uploaded is the Creative Commons copyrighted ‘Heavy Eyelids’ by Eric Skiff. It is available to download from MediaFire here, Archive.org here or Gnutella here.