Show HN: file.st - File Street: The old-school uploader. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: file.st - File Street: The old-school uploader.

file.st

15 pointsogdr21 comments

It's ugly, but hey! It serves its purpose, and you can't get stuck in the polishing nest after all! New design/features will come as they are requested by the community. Keep em' coming!

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Speaking as the operator of a similarly themed site, allowing drive-by downloads is a huge target for malware uploaders.

So how do we solve this? By only allowing hotlinks on Images or similar?

That's precisely what I do. You probably also want to scan the files for viruses at the time of upload and at regular intervals. I use ClamAV and F-Prot.

I don't see any ads anywhere, and this service looks entirely free. It's not cheap to host large files for people en masse, especially since you allow up to 250MB. For example, if this were hosted using Amazon's S3, somebody could literally just upload a lot of 250MB files and directly hit your wallet. How do you plan to keep this service afloat?

I'll bet they work in the hosting industry and they're just using spare capacity for this.

I guess I just don't understand that logic. I also work in a hosting-focused industry. We host large amounts of files for paying customers in a much less sexy industry, but we still revolve around file hosting. As a result, we have a lot of storage space and at times we have a lot of free storage space. What would be the benefit of letting people upload files to our open storage and then download them, as well, entirely for free? Seems like it'd only really "get your name out there", but with a lot more downsides than that.

I operated my site in this manner for nearly 6 years. I enjoyed tinkering on it and got a kick out of the fact that a bunch of people used it.

We have a few other hidden upload limits, and we'll probably use ads later on to solve the financial issues, but right now we're trying to estimate the interrest of the service in general.

I like how simple this is. Make it so I can copy the URL that you generate on my iPad. The photo upload is quick and easy so once you fix that this could be useful.

I find it hilarious that you mention .wma - you truly are old-school.

Thank you!

I removed the readonly attributes - Try and see if it works now! :)

Why is this better than using one of the many other services that do the exact same thing? Like, say, http://ge.tt (not affiliated with them, but just a personal favorite).

Very nice and simple. But that's quite an expensive tld you've got there. That's going to add up over the years. Unless you're using a much cheaper registrar .st domains are about $75/year I think.

Actually, they're not that expensive. The .st TLD is maintained by Bahnhof, a Swedish internet provider ( they are actually pretty cheap. Check out www.nic.st , they cost about 45USD/Year there).

Feedback: the text box you're using to show the shareable URL to the image is impossible to select and copy from on an iPhone.

I think it might have something to do with the readonly="readonly" attribute. I'll check it out!

Looks like an old-school version of http://drop.pr

Small correction: "You must chose a file to upload" -> choose.

Thank you! Fixed.

How do you intend to make money? You could end up with a significant server bill if lots of people start using the service.

Great service, btw!

how long will the files be stored?

They will be stored until they're not downloaded for a year or so. We'll calibrate the parameters along the journey, so I really can't say right now, but we'll definately let you guys know!

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