Mediafire.com Experience

Rating of Mediafire.com (7.5 out of 10, a thumbs up in general)

A Bit of the Geek:

First a note about upload and download speeds. There's kilobits per second and kilobytes per second, with each byte often defined as an octet of 8. So, technically one should be able to take kilobits per second and divide it by 8 to get the kilobytes per second. But there are overhead bits associated with TCP connections, so the real rate can be estimated by dividing by 9.5 rather than 8.

Now what's the point of the geekiness? People don't have a very good feel for how long it might take them to upload and download files, even using fast cable or DSL connections. It's a point to keep in mind when you start drooling over the massive quantities of file space any of the file space services provide. Cable upload speeds of 2048 kilobits/second translate into about 215 kilobytes per second. A 1 Gb file would take about 1.3 hrs to upload. A 4.7 Gb movie file would take a little over 6 hrs. So, before you entertain visions of transferring your hard disk to these places, consider how long you expect to live and how much free time you have to nurse an upload.

The Evaluation and Potential Use:

HHN had good results with Mediafire uploading 50 mb files, poor results with 100 mb files, and didn't try anything larger. When a 100 mb file upload breaks with an error somewhere between 50 mb and 100 mb, you have to start over again. There's no recovery mechanism -- no start from where the failure occurred. Whose fault? We give up. But the Mediafire site itself bit the dust at least once during the attempted experiments with 100 mb uploads, and was unavailable for long enough after that,  that sleep overcame us before it rose from the internet dead. The success rate with 50 mb files is over 90%. With 100 mb files, it was less than 10%.

On the other hand, Mediafire does offer a reasonably good range of services and flexible controls for the paid version. And HHN has been able to download files from there quite reliably -- even relatively large ones. The paid version does support hotlinking from the files hosted there; that could be useful for web sites that wanted to use, but not host large files. HHN doesn't have much experience with how reliably large files, such as video and audio files might be served. But even if it doesn't do that well (which it may), it still has proven useful in exchanging relatively large files like Powerpoint presentations, short video files, and other documents that greatly exceed email limits. And most web hosting sites seem to throttle FTP speeds, reserving bandwidth for web pages. So using FTP from a web hosting site isn't a real option in most cases.

The HHN recommendation is to try the free Mediafire service first. See how it performs with your system and ISP. It can be a very reasonable means of communicating with reasonably small video and audio files, photos, presentation files, etc. for those who live in Honduras with internet access. So, overall based on our recent experience, I'd give it a thumbs up for nonprofits who want to expand their visual and audio communication without the expense of "snail mail" or a "mule" from Honduras. Email mostly won't cut it for things that Mediafire can really do.