On January 19, 2012, the US Justice Department shut down MegaUpload, one of the largest file-sharing sites on the Internet. Though commonly associated with piracy, many people used MegaUpload for perfectly legal reasons. Regardless of whether personal or pirated data was stored, users lost access to their files without notice. Although file-sharing sites have taken a tough blow, there are still a fair number of sites that still offer file-sharing services. Sites such as MegaUpload, FileSonic and Uploaded.to may not be around anymore, but there are still a number of alternatives that vow to keep their services. Some of the most popular alternatives include:

RapidShare
RapidShare is a well-known alternative to MegaUpload, with nearly identical services. In order to use RapidShare and upload files, users must create a login. With an account, users can take advantage of unlimited file size and storage, but files are removed after 30 days of inactivity. While most users take advantage of the free service, users are also able to purchase a premium subscription called “RapidPro”. With different payment models, RapidPro members are able to use unlimited storage and traffic, without the standard waiting time.

Mediafire
MediaFire is a free image and file hosting site, with a relatively friendly user interface. Free users are able to drag and drop files into the site without registration, with a maximum uploading or downloading size of 200 MB. MediaFire also features paid versions, starting at 9 dollars a month. With a subscription, users are able to use direct downloads, increased file sizes and a number of additional features.

HotFile
HotFile is another hosting website that allows users to upload and download files. Free users are able to upload a file size up to 400 MB, and must wait 30 minutes between downloading files. However, premium users are able to access unlimited, multiple downloading, with direct linking services.

WUpload
Similar to the above, WUpload is another hosting service that allows users to upload files up to 10 GB. One of the main characteristics of the premium service is speed: customers are able to access increased download and upload speeds, as well as unlimited storage and file size.

DropBox
DropBox is a cloud-based hosting service, which allows users to share files with each other. Unlike direct download sites, users must download a client in order to use DropBox. Free users are given an account to store up to 2GB of space , while subscription services allows customers to take advantage of additional storage space. DropBox also offers a service tailored for businesses, providing unlimited storage space at 795 a year for the first five users.

==== About the Author ====

Rachel Hyun Kim is a writer on topics ranging from payroll services to background checks. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including telemarketing for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

The dramatic Megaupload crackdown has turned the online file sharing world upside down by shattering the illusion of invulnerability that many of these operators enjoyed. Earlier today, Uploaded.to shut out US users, while Filesonic pulled the plug globally. Since then, several more cyber lockers have followed suit.

Filesonic, which receives more than a billion page views every month, seems to be on the run. Not only is it restricting users from downloading files uploaded by others, there are also reports of large scale file deletion. The Twitter account of Filesonic, which is typically fairly chirpy, has also vanished off the face of the earth. Somewhat surprisingly, WUpload – which is Filesonic’s sister site, continues to function.

Fileserve, another popular file sharing service, has also capitulated. Going forward, you will only be able to download your own files from Fileserve. Other services operated by Fileserve – including Uploadstation, Filejungle, VideoBB and Videozer – also seem to be in shutdown mode. Affiliate program has been yanked, and user accounts and files are being deleted en masse. None of the files that I found through Google Search were downloadable.

Other services that Torrent Freak is reporting as down are Uploadbox, x7.to, and Filepost. 4shared has also terminated its affiliate program. However, unlike most of the other services, it has promised to pay out any dues within the next fifteen days.

Two industry stalwarts that have refused to budge are RapidShare and Mediafire. Both of them have decided to distance themselves from Megaupload, and are harping on the legitimacy of their business model. In fact, Mediafire even went a step further, and promised to shakeup the cloud storage industry with a major new release in the next quarter. I have included the responses from Rapidshare and Mediafire below.

Dear RapidShare fans,
You posted some comments on our wall today regarding the shutdown of Megaupload. There is no reason to be concerned. We distinguish ourselves from services like Megaupload in many major issues and we aren’t threatened in any way. One of the main differences between RapidShare and Megaupload is that we never wanted to escape from the legal access of any administration. RapidShare AG was founded in Switzerland, was always based at the address cited in the imprint and was always managed with an authentic name without any anonymous intermediary companies. The drastic measures against Megaupload were obviously seen as necessary by the FBI because the situation was different there.
We wish you a great time with RapidShare!

MediaFire’s premium services are based on a user’s ability to upload data and pay to distribute it. This storage and sharing model is similar to Akamai, Amazon S3, YouSendIt, etc. MediaFire has no caps or restrictions for downloading data and each upload is limited to a maximum size of 200MB for non-premium users.

Most importantly, people choose MediaFire because it offers high quality services that are simple to use and extremely powerful. We incorporate the latest HTML5 technologies, the most advanced user interfaces, and are constantly expanding our services with features requested by businesses and professionals. In Q2 2012, MediaFire will redefine how people access and manage their data and how they interact with the cloud by releasing long-in-development desktop and mobile applications that solve problems Microsoft, Dropbox, and Box fail to address.

A little more about MediaFire:

MediaFire was founded in 2006 and is based near Houston, Texas. MediaFire is used by people at 86% of Fortune 500 companies and is currently ranked in the top 100 websites globally by Amazon’s Alexa and Google/DoubleClick’s Ad Planner services.

Thanks again everyone, especially to our fans who we’ve heard loud and clear evangelizing the benefits of our service. It’s easy for us to get caught up in building our technology and services and we haven’t spent enough time espousing our own benefits and differentiators. The cloud is an incredibly convenient and powerful tool for many professionals, businesses and individuals. At MediaFire, we are committed to continuing to innovate on this technology and provide it to our users in new, simple, ethical and cost effective ways.

It looks like the Megaupload takedown is not just prompting rebuttal from sites like Uploaded.to, but also has put fear in the minds of other large File sharing websites.

After Uploaded.to blocked U.S. users, another large file sharing website called FileSonic has now stopped users from downloading files that other’s have uploaded.

When compared to Uploaded.to, FileSonic is a very large website with an Alexa global rank of 167 and a U.S. rank of 220. Compete data shows that FileSonic gets approximately 1.9 million visitors from the United States. The site now displays a message as shown below when you try to download a file from FileSonic.

All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.

If this file belongs to you, please login to download it directly from your file manager

It is not really clear as to whether FileSonic stopped file downloads due to fear of being targeted by the FBI and US Justice Department or whether they have already been targeted. However, it looks like that file sharing websites are starting to become cautious of what data they hold on their servers thanks to the U.S. Justice Department and FBI crackdown.

If you are affected by this, don’t forget to check out several alternatives to Megaupload to store files in the cloud and other ways to share files online. You can also check out services like Dropbox and SugarSync among others to easily sync and share your files online or take a look at several other services to backup and sync your files online.

This has been a very interesting last few days with the draconian piracy law of SOPA and PIPA being defeated in the U.S. Congress and Megaupload being shutdown by the U.S. Justice Department. In fact the Megaupload website was back online shortly on different servers as well.

In retaliation of the Megaupload shutdown, the famous group Anonymous also took down several websites in protest. However, it looks like the protest is now growing to another level.

According to reports from Torrent Freak, another file sharing website called Uploaded.to is now blocking users from U.S. and not allowing them to upload or download files from their service. This is definitely a big rebuttal from them and would likely make other services follow in their footsteps.

Currently, users who visit uploaded.to from United States are displayed a message similar to the one in the image above. It reads:

Not available

Our service is currently unavailable in your country. Sorry about that.

Uploaded.to has a traffic rank of 3075 in the United States according to Alexa and serves about 350K users from United States according to Compete. Though their stats are no where near what Megaupload had; which was the 13th most popular website in the world, it would definitely inconvenience U.S. users who have used it to store files on the website.

There is no official update from Uploaded.to about this blockage and whether it will remain permanent. In the meantime, if you have been affected by the Megaupload takedown or the Uploaded.to blockage, don’t forget to check out several alternatives to Megaupload to store files in the cloud and other ways to share files online.

The U.S. Anti-piracy law SOPA and PIPA may be off the table for now, however, it did deal a a major blow to the 13th most visited site on the internet – “Megaupload” in some way.

Yesterday, the Justice Department of US shutdown Megaupload; one of the most popular online file sharing website in the world. Along with the closure of the website, they also arrested 7 people in connection with piracy and other charges. The downside of this was that several users might have lost legitimate files hosted on their servers forever.

However, it looks like Megaupload is now making its way back on the internetz in another form. A forum post on a website (via Giga OM) says that Megaupload is now back online through a new domain name called megavideo.biz. However, the domain does not work fully, but they do have a working IP which does say that the site is back and they are working on it to get back to earlier levels soon.

The message reads:

WE DON’T HAVE ANY DOMAIN NAME FOR NOW

ONLY THIS IP ADDRESS (http://109.236.83.66) BEWARE TO THE PISHING SITES!

This is the NEW MEGAUPLOAD SITE! we are working to be back full again

Bookmark the site and share the new address in facebook and twitter!

A quick WhoIS of the IP address shows that the server is located in Amsterdam, Netherlands by the RIPE Network Coordination Center and not Sweden where File sharing is an official religion . Ironically, the Megaupload operation was a international co-operation between United States and several other countries which included Netherlands, so there is no guarantee that the above IP address may stay up for a long time.

It is not clear whether the site owners have access to the uploaded files when the Feds seized the Megaupload domains and servers. However, it could be that the site owners might have kept backups of the files in other locations as well.

It would be interesting to see, if the site really comes back into operation and how they would allow users to download files which they have already uploaded.  If you have been a Megaupload user, don’t forget to check out several alternatives to Megaupload to store files in the cloud and other ways to share files online.

Sweden is pretty awesome. Not only is it the country that originated the pirate party a political party whose ideology revolves around open sharing of information between people it is also the first country to recognize file sharing as a religion and the shortcuts Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V as holy signs. The Church of Kopimism (that is what the religion is called: Kopimism) hopes that its newfound legal status may make the lawmakers think a little differently when they are outlining laws against software piracy and also promote peer-to-peer file sharing throughout the world. (Their motto is Copy and Seed)

Founded by philosophy student Isak Gerson, a self confessed pirate who religiously copies files, the Missionary Church of Kopimism wanted the believers in the sacred act of copying to not be persecuted for their beliefs. Since anyone can become a member of this Church, anyone trying to persecute you for sharing your files or receiving other files is infringing upon your democratic right to religion and religious beliefs. If you thought Gerson was a little wacky, he is but he is also extremely clever.

For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament. Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains, and the value multiplies through copying. Therefore, copying is central for the organisation and its members.

After a couple of failed attempts to legalize their religion, the kopimi (the believers of this Church) were finally registered as followers of an official religion just before Christmas. If you wish to change your religion to something that actually reflects your viewpoints look no further than here.

You know what’s the biggest frustration of sharing large files with an online friend?

It’s not the technology you use but the technology used by the other person who needs your files and has never heard of services like DropBox, Windows Live Skydrive, YouSendIt and so on. There have been times when this friend of mine calls up in the middle of night saying Hey I need all those project files right this instant.

I asked him whether he has a DropBox or a Skydrive account, and he replies What’s that? I mean why don’t you email me all those files(he is not aware of the 25 MB email attachment limit and wants me to upload all files one by one, while I am dying to sleep).

Winzip is trying to solve this situation with its brand new social file sharing feature ZipSend and ZipShare (nice names).

WinZip’s ZipSend Send Files Up to 2GB Via Email

Here is how it works.

ZipSend lets you compress multiple files and folders into a single archive, which you can email to anyone. It is basically an email plugin that marries your desktop or online email client (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo). When your files have finished uploading, ZipSend will email the recipient a download link of all the files as a new email message.

You will need a ZipSend account (Free) and have to install the WinZip Courier application on your system. The free plan of ZipSend lets you upload up to 50 MB of archived files for free, while the Pro option allows 2GB of file uploads via your ZipSend account.

So what makes ZipSend stand out from DropBox and other competing file sharing products? Nothing, except the fact that some people are over obsessed with email attachments and they are really skeptical on using third party sites for file downloads.

Send them a thousand email attachments and they feel secured and happy.

That’s where ZipSend fits in, when your target users are really basic and they want those files right in their email inbox. Otherwise, the features of ZipSend are still in its developing stages. For example; the free account of ZipSend gives you only 50 MB per file upload while the maximum number of files sent per month is restricted to 100. The Pro account sounds a little liberal at 2GB per file but then it costs $9.99 a month. Compared to Dropbox, which allows file uploads of up to 300 MB in size for free accounts, ZipSend is simply a waste of time.

ZipShare: A File Upload Container For Your Facebook Profile

Unlike ZipSend, ZipShare is completely free and lets you quickly share files with Facebook friends and groups. Not more than 20MB per file though.

Go to Zipshare.com, login with your Facebook account, upload all the files and share the download link on your wall or a Facebook group. The maximum disk space of your ZipShare account is 100 MB while the maximum file size per upload is 20 MB. Not bad!

A word of caution here. Once the download link is posted on your Facebook wall, any of your Facebook friends can click through to see what you have just shared. ZipShare does not support Facebook friend lists yet, so there is no way to share files with only specific Facebook friends. A little awkward but if that’s fine on your half, ZipShare is the ideal choice for sharing random files with Facebook friends. Pretty quick actually!

For the curious, I don’t use Winzip. $29.95 > 7Zip

2010 was not a good year for those looking for free movie downloads and other not-quite-legal files. Many of the file sharing sites were either shut down or forced to go legit. One of the most popular sites, The Pirate Bay, is one example of the sites being forced offline.

One of the best way to share files online is using the  BitTorrent protocol. Bittorrent shared files are stored across many different personal computers over the internet, making them almost impossible to shut down. Even though a site like Pirate Bay can be shuttered, the BitTorrent shared files are still around, and there are still ways to search for them.

Recently, the TorrentFreak website posted 2010′s top 100 searches for BitTorrent downloads. Here are the top ten items from their list.

1. inception
2. iron man 2
3. 2010
4. xxx
5. french
6. avatar
7. dvdrip
8. despicable me
9. porn
10. clash of the titans

Some of those searches aren’t surprising. Others in the list leave us wondering what people were really looking for. What’s so great about frenchdownloads? If you have some clue, let us know in the comments below.

Here are a few other posts about BitTorrent, in case you are curious.

Torrent Search bar, search torrents from firefox

Best Peer to Peer (P2P) & Torrent Software Clients for File Sharing

How to Open .torrent Files?

Disable BitTorrent Integration in Opera [How To]

The Pirate Bay: Finally Silenced by Hollywood, But For How Long?

6 Tools for Anonymous Torrenting Options

GE.TT is an online file sharing service that lets you share any file with anyone. Sharing or sending files has become a necessity these days and with the rising demand, more apps have been developed to serve the purpose.

GE.TT addresses the task with a very simple three-step solution. Upload, share and move on. No need to sign up for an account. Go to the site and upload your file and share it with anyone on Facebook and Twitter. You can also share the file with anyone by sending the sharing URL. Users can share multiple files with a single GE.TT URL.

There is also an option to share the file by sending an email to the person by filling up the email form. All the files that you share using GE.TT expire after 30 days.

However, you can also sign up for the service. The only added advantage of having an account is that you can view the list and stats for the shared URLs. GE.TT has no restrictions on the size of the file you can share, but browsers can put an upload limit of 2GB.

Techie-Buzz Verdict:

Considering all the options it provide and that too in a simple way, the tool is highly recommended. One thing to note is that, the shared files being public, confidential information should not be shared using this service.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

There are quite a good number of free file sharing websites available on the web, most of them do not require users to create an account . You can simply open the homepage of the file sharing website, upload a file, grab the link and share it with anyone.

The problem with majority of file sharing services is that you have to wait for the uploads to finish. You are not given the shareable download link, until the file has finished uploading. There are two main disadvantages of this approach.

The first annoyance is when your browser crashes suddenly, while you are uploading a file. Imagine this – you are uploading a 50 MB file on a free file sharing website and the uploads crash at 80 %. You have to start the upload procedure all over again.

The second disadvantage is time dependency, you can’t share the download link of the file while it’s uploading and have to wait for the uploads to finish.

That’s when Ge.tt saves the day !

Ge.tt takes a different approach, the site provides the download link immediately after you have selected the file(s) to be uploaded. Head over to the Ge.tt homepage, select the files to upload and grab the shareable download link. No sign-ups or registrations are required.

There are three handy options available on the upload page – share on Twitter, share on Facebook or share via email. Just click the corresponding link and the download link is shared on your social profile. Handy !

All files that are shared using Ge.tt expire in 30 days, by default. By creating a free account, you get some added features e.g real-time statistics telling exactly how many users have downloaded your file, more expiry days and so on.

Ge.tt works directly from your browser – no Flash, JavaScript applets, absolutely nothing to install. Do give Ge.tt a try and let us know your ideas in the comments section. [ via ]