I’ve been using DivShare for a while now to host a lot of the images on this site and some large download files. It’s been a great service, totally reliable, fast speeds and a really nice, clean interface. Recently they released some nice embeddable flash players for mp3s and video files too. That opened up a whole new range of possibilities for hosting podcast files (such as our church’s), but in the back of my mind I’ve had a nagging doubt about their long-term staying power. There didn’t seem to be any revenue generation model other than a couple of Google ads. Considering the fact they’ve been offering unlimited storage and transfers with a 200MB file size limit, this didn’t seem like a profit-making enterprise.

Fortunately my fears have been unfounded and DivShare have just announce a ‘pro’ version of their service which allows for a 2GB maximum file size, unlimited number of uploads at a time using the Power Uploader application (normally max of 10) and possibly the most important feature: FTP access. These features are available at either US$0.99 per 2GB file or a US$9.95 per month subscription. This now puts them in direct competition of services like DropSend, and with double the individual file size and no storage or transfer limit, they beat out DropSend’s pricing by a country mile and that’s without the image / video / audio hosting options DivShare provide. DivShare already provided a facility to directly email people a download link for any file you upload.

Now I don’t have a huge need for the pro subscription. US$9.95 per month is not really a lot if you’re doing massive data transfers, but then, I don’t need to upload 2GB files. Even if I started using it as a podcasting hosting service, the files are usually less than 5MB in size, so that’s well under the free 200MB limit. What this new service means for me though is that they now have a revenue stream, and are therefore more likely to be a stable, long-term hosting option. And it’s nice to know that if I do have some need to upload some huge file, I can.

I’ll still be keeping a local backup of all my files just in case, but I do that for any hosting service I use, paid or not. Kudos to the DivShare guys for creating such a great service & I hope they make an insane amount of money off this new service, they deserve a payoff for all their hard work.

[tags]DivShare, Images, Hosting, Uploads, Podcasts[/tags]