Comment by NoFile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoFile | Hacker News Reader

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What's different to so-called 1-click hosters (rapidshare, mega, uploaded, ...)?

The main difference is that nearly all of these hosts specialize in a specific type of storage. As an example MEGA forces all users to client-side encrypt files before uploading which is useful for sensitive files, but it comes with the cost of incompatibilities with older browsers and devices which can't decrypt/download the files.

Uploaded provides lots of space for the uploaders, but then pushes all users to its premium plan. The site is ridiculously slow to use as a free user as they cap download speeds to 50 KB/s (they bump it up to a 70 KB/s if you take the time to sign-up).

NoFile bundles all the perks of the different hosts and gives the user more options and fewer limits. You can upload large files and choose whether you want to password protect, encrypt or disable previews for your file while still giving the downloaders speeds of at least 2 MB/s.

It's just a simple file host that allows you to share files without having to worry about the downloaders being infected with a virus, not being able to download

What's your business model?

At the moment there is no revenue source. As costs for the hosting go up, there will be a more "humane" premium plan added in the future, but it will targeted to very frequent users and as a free users you won't be affected by the changes.

How do you want to keep DMCA claims at bay?

If a valid DMCA request is sent in together with a link then we will be forced to respect the content creator and take the link down.

Does this work mobile?

This works on every single device regardless of whether you have Javascript enabled or not. If you however enable the client-side encryption feature (currently in BETA) which is disabled by default then users on older browsers and devices won't be able to download your file.

At the moment there is no revenue source.

So what makes you think your fate will be any different than that of all the other free file hosts that have had to resort to advertising in order to survive?

The site will simply not operate with large margins like other sites. The cost of keeping the servers and development running will be covered by a premium plan that's targeted to heavy users.

Isn't storing and serving terabytes of stuff pretty expensive? How many heavy users do you think you'll manage to win over in the first place, much less convince them to pay for the privilege of uploading their 100GB of illicit car diagnostic software to your website? Do you have an actual niche you plan to target?

I don't mean to be negative, it's just that I've seen the transition from free to freemium to ad-supported to Rapidshare to dead happen over and over again. These services don't seem to operate with large margins - from the outside, it looks more like all of them are on the brink of bankruptcy.

I generally see prices of 2 cents per gigabyte per month for active storage, even less, most under half a cent per gigabyte per month for long-term archival. Assuming there were willing to fork out 10 dollars a month, they would be able to get around a terabyte of storage.

Lets imagine our average citizen uploads quarter of a gigabyte, that means 4,000 visitors uploading files per $10 client. Assuming you can keep other costs really low, it's not too outrageously expensive.

You're forgetting the transfer / bandwidth costs.

But also offsetting credits from dedup.

Not with encryption

A few years ago bandwidth and storage was much more expensive than it is today.

Rapidshare was a service that had to swiftly and reluctantly change their business model. They were operating out of large offices with over 60 employees and due to the change they saw a sudden drstic drop in revenue.

Rapidshare's financial information isn't public since it's a private company, but one could argue whether they were actually losing money or not making the profits that they expected at the time of the shutdown.

I think Rapidshare earned tons of money. At one time RS was the go-to filehost for pirated material. They had almost anything you wanted, and they seldom removed files.

Then came the FBI raid against various filehosts. I remember few of the other hosts got taken down and charged, while others shut their site down as precaution. I remember Rapidshare starting their decline during this phase, something tells me Rapidshare did it on purpose and 'ran away' with the earned money before the feds got them.

Well thats my theory :)

This is a misnomer, as bandwidth gets cheaper, file sizes get larger due to technological advance. Think about the average size of a photo from 2006 and from 2016.

Your post reads like someone who knows nothing about the difficulties or complexities of this space, the economics, what customers will or will not pay for, or the legalities associated. I've heard this same pitch (or a similar variant) many times in the past, and the result is always the same.

The most concerning aspect of your model is charging users for download speed. That might cause users to pay you, but it puts an incentive on business to host questionable content. Megaupload and Rapidshare were doing the same thing.

>> "there will be a more humane premium plan"

In plain-English, what does this mean?

Basic features will be available to all free users and no extreme upload/download limits (e.g 100 KB/s download speeds, 100 MB upload limits, etc.).

Sounds exactly like other services that offer premium file services, how is this different? Also, while I know you're claiming this doesn't take away from the free users, it clearly does.

I think he meant to say he isn't limiting them to 100kbs and 100mb (drastic limits).

Sounds awesome, now if you could integrate with Rclone, that would be great.

It will definitely be looked into as it seems to be compatible with lots of different platforms, thanks for the advice.

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