A File Hosting Service is an online service of file storage system which allows the users to store their files (which are static content, mostly large files, and are not web pages) over the Internet or a corporate network on a central data store and access them via a client or web browser. Most of the cloud storage services allows to host web pages, for example Rackspace Cloud Files, IBM Cloud and so on. In general, these File Hosting Services allow web access and FTP access. They can be optimized to serve many users or be optimized for single-user. The related services of this niche are Related services are video hosting, image hosting, virtual storage, software hosting and remote backup.
Most such services simply return a short URL that can be broadcast to other people, so that they can download the file and can do it with any browser. Since these sites have dramatically increased their popularity and many of the smaller and less efficient sites have failed. The popular ones may be Dropbox, Rapidshare (closed in 2015), the new Mega, File Dropper and so on. Although usually the hosted files are usually larger than the space offered for hosting users divide the files into parts of approximately 100 megabytes thus also facilitating access to the contents to users who do not have premium accounts.
Most file storage services space reaches the gigabyte, some offer the service for free, funding for advertising. Some services require software installation specific to that particular page. In Google Drive, on OneDrive or iCloud the huge storage space is used by some users as a virtual hard drive, where they upload some files to download later on another mac. Depending on the provider and server software, different functions are provided. Most of the time, these are:
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- Versioning files so that different version states are stored from a file (with the same name)
- Restoring old file versions
- Recycle bin function (i.e. restoring deleted files)
- File up and download via smartphone app on Android devices and iPhone/iPad
- Synchronization of online and offline data (i.e. between data on the server and the client/s)
- Online editing of Office documents via web interface directly on the server (e.g. text- or table-based files)
- Automatic e-mail notification for recipients when files have been set for them.
- Notification when certain files have been automatically deleted. For example, if the sender wants the uploaded files to be automatically deleted by the file exchange service after a certain period of time.
- Automatic conversion of specific file formats (for example, an image file was uploaded by the sender as JPG and can be downloaded by the recipient in GIF format).
- Grant access rights to individual directories, directory trees, individual files, and filegroups. This shows the user only what he or she has access to.
- Internal (relative) HTML links to adjacent files.
Some of the advantages of file hosting services over P2P technologies are greater availability of active files, , improved download performance, niche content, and least economic burden.
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