Free File Hosting

February 5, 2007 7:38 AM

Where can I host a few files online? Preferably with no bandwidth limit and ideally for free!

I've made a small flash game and I'd like other people to be able to play it. I have some space to host the website but I can't really handle the bandwidth requirements if it got popular. Is there any decent, free online service that I could upload the .swf file and host it there, but still having the rest of the website hosted on my machine?

I'd adjust the page on my site to load the file from the uplaod site, so I'd need the uploaded .swf to be publicly accessible (read only). The file itself isn't huge (around 200k) but might be bigger as I amend the game and add features.

posted by gaby to computers & internet (10 comments total)

google pages?
posted by claudius at 8:03 AM on February 5, 2007

You could store it on Amazon S3.

200KB * $0.20 per gigabyte transferred = $38 per million downloads

I'd say if you get a million people playing your game, you have bigger things to think about (i.e., advertising revenue) than your $38 bill.
posted by dmd at 8:06 AM on February 5, 2007

Alternatively, you could give it to me. I'd be happy to host it for you - I might have to reconsider if you start getting more than about a million visitors a month, but, again, if you get that kind of traffic, you've got bigger things to worry about.
posted by dmd at 8:08 AM on February 5, 2007

box.net
posted by Dave Faris at 8:17 AM on February 5, 2007

Newgrounds.com or DeviantArt. These also allow for feedback/ranking.
posted by JeremiahBritt at 8:48 AM on February 5, 2007

Newgrounds is an excellent idea.
posted by dmd at 9:57 AM on February 5, 2007

yousendit.com

posted by cmicali at 10:19 AM on February 5, 2007

Newgrounds looks good, box.net make no indication about bandwidth limits. I'm looking to host the site on my machine but just the .swf file somewhere with decent bandwidth. I'll have a play with box.net and see if that works, but S3 might be the most robust option here.

Thank you for the very kind offer dmd, I may be in touch :)
posted by gaby at 10:29 AM on February 5, 2007

Just pay a small amount for S3 or use somewhere like DreamHost that gives you a daft amount of bandwidth.

Make sure the page displaying it is on a domain you own, and apply some simple precautions to make it a little harder for others to nab it for their own use (use .htaccess to prevent hotlinking, and ActionScript to only run the game when loaded from your domain).
posted by malevolent at 10:55 AM on February 5, 2007

The S3 service seems to do the job nicely. Interachy also speaks natively to S3. Within 10 minutes, I've now got it hosted on S3, a crossdomain.xml policy file restricting swf access, and very shortly the flash code will only allow the swf to run from specific domains.

Being that I control my own DNS as well, I have it hosted under a suitable name too. Sorted! Thanks everybody!
posted by gaby at 12:25 PM on February 5, 2007