DivShare.com - Another Alternative to Web Hosting?

• By Liam Eagle on January 09, 2007

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Ordinarily Isabel covers this sort of thing, but I got a heads-up straight from the horse's mouth, so I thought I'd step on her toes a little with this post.

David Altschul, co-founder of DivShare.com sent me a note advising of the new free file hosting site's launch. According to his email, the service is "a cross between YouSendIt, ImageShack and Flickr."

(He also sent a link to a gallery of screencaps illustrating the site's functions)

The service is designed for uploading and sharing pictures, music, video and whatever other material people are into sending back and forth these days (PDFs, maybe?). It creates thumbnails and image galleries automatically, and it has co-branding features designed specifically for bloggers, enabling them to add their site's name and logo to their file download pages.

Interesting feature: "files stay online forever!"

It would certainly seem that DivShare stands to push into further obsolescence the once-upon-a-time notion of the Web hosting account as online storage for the distribution of files. What can't you distribute online these days through a free blogging account and the ever-expanding range of supplemental services?

So how, exactly, do the folks behind DivShare intend to make money by hosting and distributing my files for free, forever?

According to the "advertise" link on the site, well, with advertising.

"As you may have noticed, there are no ads on the site right now. We'll be putting a few up shortly, but we also promise never to invade your DivShare experience with loud, unstable or otherwise obnoxious ads.

If you're in the business of reaching thousands of diverse web users every day, we'd love to work with you to set up a DivShare campaign."

There's definitely advertising in the site's future. And perhaps a paid version a la Flickr is somewhere down the line. Right now, however, it's free, it works (assuming you can see the DivShare-hosted screencap in this post) and it's one more reason your average small-time Web publisher no longer needs to rely on an ordinary, old-fashioned Web host to store and distribute its files.

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