If my math is right, these guys need somewhere on the order of a hojillion gigs of space if they want to give away an account or three to every digg, reddit, and news.yc reader.

That's the dirty little secret of a lot of web storage and hosting sites. They can sell you gigs upon gigs of storage because in all likelihood, you'll never use all of it, or by the time you do, storage will have come down in price.

Sure there are some users who will max out their accounts, but those will be averaged by those who hardly use any.

As a person working on a web storage product, I'll tell you that's not a dirty little secret--it's our business.

Sound's very loosely like fractional banking. What percent do you have to keep on hand per user in order to prevent maxing out the storage capacity? Or do you just let it max out and then add more storage?

Couple of suggestions:

1. HTTP/DAV access. 2. I wasn't able to get direct URL link, other than by digging into the HTML. Not user-friendly. 3. Changing permissions did no affect file visibility - I can still see it from outside of my account. 4. List of files should have permissions listed, right now I have to click a button to see permissions.

Good luck.

The site seems to be struggling--some images take forever to load and some of its functions don't work. Maybe they got flooded by inviting all the social news people.

I agree. It's taking its time with me, and I haven't tried uploading or downloading anything yet. At least my account says "paid until Jan. 2038"

I'm gonna try compressing and uploading my pictures (just <2GB) then downloading them to test out their transfer speeds. There's a 5GB filesize limit which is nice. If it's fast enough it will probably replace Gmail drafts as my filetransfer of choice. I'll post with the results when done.

"The files are kept forever as long as they are being downloaded".

Do they say how long after the last download the files are kept? Else they could always free up some disc space by removing the least recently downloaded files.

Is it just me, or is the sign-up YCed/redditted/slashdotted?

http://www.filedropper.com/makefreeaccount.php gives me a time-out error.

Looks like they got overwhelmed: "Due to extreme popularity we are experiencing unexpectedly high traffic. This special will not be available till tomorrow morning (9 AM PST). If you would like to sign up for accounts starting at 99 Cents please sign up here."

feels like a bait and switch, but for 99 cents... you might get what you pay for :(

Upload utility seems to break Firefox 3 Beta 5 with Ubuntu 8.04.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 (which is great) worked for my upload on XP. The only issue was that the cursor mouseover on the upload button didn't change from an arrow to a hand -- not sure if that's a bug or a feature.

I'm trying to upload a rather large file, but it cuts off before it reaches even 1MB with FF2 and XP. I am at a public wifi right now though.

No gotcha on signup page? No email checking? How many bogus account will they get?

If I wanted spread warez, I would run some bots and create a bunch of accounts.

I just tried it, very slow. I was trying to upload a 2 gb file, it stops and stucks at 224kb.

The word simplest just throws me off. "Most simple" seems more right then "Simplest".

lifetime membership? but my account said it's paid until January 18, 2038! :D

Haven't you heard? 2038 is when the world is going to end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Exactly why I brought it up in the first place. :P

Awesome, thanks!