Cool Site: Savefile.com

I've been intending to tell you about this site for some time but I've been having a struggle with my conscience and so haven't posted about it till tonight.

The struggle is simply this: The site has an affiliate program, meaning, if I can get you to sign up through my affiliate link, I can collect Brownie points that will help me by allowing those who download my files to do so without seeing an advertising page first. There's no money changing hands and I would, of course, tell you it's an affiliate link, but it just seemed to open the door to future duplicity.

So I've decided to give you the "raw" link. That means if you sign up for their service I gain nothing from it except the pleasure of knowing I've helped you get your stuff across to whoever you want to send it to, with no compromise on my integrity. I want to be able to look you in the figurative eye and tell you to go to a particular site or use a particular software because I genuinely believe it will solve your problem or enhance your online presence, not because I make something off it.

And so, after that bit of pontificating, here's the dirt on Savefile.com:
Ever so often we have files we'd like to share with others. Not just friends, perhaps those who are visiting our website or acquaintances in an online network like Ryze, LinkedIn or Ecademy. We can't possibly email each one of them. One solution, of course, is to host the file on our website and offer a link for download. I've done that with sample scenes from my plays.

However, this is not always possible. We may not have a website or there may be bandwidth constraints (some website hosts do not allow files over a particular size to be hosted or do not allow downloads over a certain limit).

So we have to use another online repository. Yahoo Briefcase no longer allows public downloads. Most other online repositories have bandwidth and / or file size limits. Not so Savefile.

I like Savefile because it has an upper limit of 60MB for each file and NO LIMIT on the number or frequency of downloads. In other words, those to whom you make the download link available may download the file any number of times, share the link with firends who may, in turn, download the file and then share the link with their friends and so on.

There's a catch of course, but it's a negligible one. When your friends / visitors click the download link, they are first taken to an advertising page where the actual download button may be seen. In my opinion, this is a negligible price to pay for free hosting upto 60MB per file and unlimited downloads.

Be warned, however, if there are no downloads for a period of 14 days, your file is deleted from Savefile with no prior warning to you. This is the one bad thing about Savefile. Again, in my opinion, it's a small price to pay for the site's very generous filesize and bandwidth allowance. All you need to do is log in every few days and check the download statistics. If there have been no downloads for the last 13 days, just log out, click your own download link and download the file to keep it alive. Beats paying for hosting and bandwidth.

Deepak