As Randalator said, Dropbox doesn't synchronize by default. You can turn synchronization on, but you don't have to.
I use it for exactly what you describe without any synchronization.

As ZFR noted, Dropbox is what you're looking for. I use it myself, just as ZFR does. No sync and you can give as much or as little access to others as you want.

OK I'll look into that one, but I'll look into the others on the list as well, because I also want to make sure it's secure that that I can do the things that I need to do with user accounts, etc.

I think you're getting confused with what you're looking for. You started asking for a free file host. Now you're asking for what we call in the hosting community a reseller account which lets you setup accounts for others and allow them admin access to those accounts. That's where you say "I can make however many login accounts I want."

The free version of Dropbox only allows 1 account to have admin access to the account. You can have others download from it via a link you provide but that's pretty much it. They offer what you're asking for in their business accounts but those are not free.

To answer your question about why file hosts are dropping their free acounts, it's for two reasons.

1) You get abuse like this: http://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/dropbox-led-alleged-online-child-pornography-stash-cobb-man-arrest/CSfAM0Jk32mztu8RwKP8wK/

and 2) even though hard drive space is "dirt cheap" it's still not free for the hosts. I work for a webhosting company that caters to soccer moms and just our bandwidth runs about $21k a month and that's not counting rack costs, hands on time, hardware and software costs, licensing, salaries, etc. Many of the providers tried to balance those costs vs advertisements and trying to get their free customers to upgrade to paid accounts but I gather it didn't work since many if not all have dropped the program.

You can find VPS providers that offer up a slice of their servers for dirt cheap. I pay $50/year to one provider but he did me a favor a few years back and I always pay my debts. He providers cheaper slices as well (down to $12.50/year) but you really need to know what you;re doing to manage the memory you;re allowed. Plus it's a VPS with the normal text interface, not windows with the pretty graphics. You can do what you want with it but you need some experience.

I;m not sure what the policy is about linking to outside providers like in this case so I;m not providing the link. I would suggest google'ing for "low end vps". Again, you're going to know what you;re doing though with the box.)

Hope this helps

I wonder what you're up to... Note that all cloud drive offers scan the contents of the files (because... child pr0n and the NSA also wants to know what's going on...). Also all up-/downloads are logged, meaning - even if you don't leave a paper trail with your payment info, your IP will be there when you upload stuff. A anonymous VPN would be needed to upload safely, but most of them are less anonymous than you think (and they work with the law enforcement, if asked).

The only half-way safe way to distribute files without getting caught is by using Hidden Services (TOR network), paid with Bitcoin. And even then you have to be very careful not to leave traces to your real identity. The people who got caught all made simple mistakes, like using an email address they also use outside TOR or logging into admin backends from outside TOR. Or simply spilling the beans by providing RL info to people they trusted.

I'm almost sure the free version also allows you to share files with other Dropbox accounts directly rather that via link.

So all the OP has to do is ensure whover he wants to share with have their own dropbox accounts.

Thanks for the info drmike, it's very useful, but one thing for sure is that I'm not going to get one that isn't free.

toxicTom, the mistakes you're suggesting are so stupid that those people must be braindead. Anyway, what makes you think I want to do anything illegal? I don't! I just don't want people snooping around. How does that make me a criminal?

Well that's the thing. I do NOT want just any random person with a Dropbox account to be able to access the files.

They won't. You select specifically the dropbox accounts who'll have access.

EDIT: I just checked. You can share files via 2 methods. Either create a link in which case anyone with the link will have access, or a specific email (in which case I presume only those logging to dropbox through the email will have access).

Not 100% sure, but you can test it out quickly. It's free and will take 10 mins tops.

If they're logging in through an e-mail it seems like it would have to be a link.

Anyway, I've had a chance to compare the ones on the Wikipedia list (I'll read more about them specifically), and for all the free ones with no file expiration and no bandwidth limit (or one that I'd never reach anyway) in terms of the max file size, max storage size, here's what I've found:

CloudMe is right next to Dropbox on the list, but looks a lot better, because there's no bandwidth restriction, no file expiration, and I get 3 GB for storage instead of 2 GB. However, I only get 150 MB per file, but that's not so bad, but for some reason I get 10 GB per file with Dropbox, which doesn't make sense if there's only 2 GB in total for storage! Does anyone understand that?

Anyway, as for others, there's Sync.com, which looks even better because I get 5 GB of storage, with no file size limit (although I guess there's an implied 5 GB limit), and no expiration or bandwidth limit! It says it can't be used for HTML files (I don't know why), but I'm not planning to do that anyway. It looks better than either of the other two so far, but does anyone know of a downside to Sync.com?

So the other one that looks like it might be good is Yandex Disk, which offers 10 GB storage and 2 GB per file! There's no file expiration and the bandwidth is ridiculously high for what I would need. It almost seems too good to be true, but does anyone have an opinion on it?

There's one that looks maybe even better called Baidu Cloud, but supposedly it's only available in Chinese, so it might be hard to use.

And does anyone know what they mean by "direct access"?



EDIT: OK, now this is really starting to piss me off, because I've researched them and here's what I've found:

Dropbox has HUGE privacy and security problems and the NSA has had its fingers in it, so there's no way I'm going with that one.

CloudMe is a downloadable application rather than a website, which although is acceptable is not ideally what I was looking for, and as far as I can tell, although you can choose which files to synchronize, it seems as though only those files will be copied onto it and nothing else (I couldn't synchronize anything anyway because the files will be on portable USB drives that will be removed from the computer, nor do I WANT to synchronize - I simply want to upload them and have them stay there until I delete them).

I can't even find any documentation on Yandex Disk but it seems to imply that it works similarly to CloudMe, as far as I can tell.

Ditto for Sync.com as far as I can tell.


Basically, I guess what I'm looking for is just something more like SourceForge or GitHub (as I'm lead to believe they work), but not for code, but rather just arbitrary files. I don't want any synchronization or versioning or separate program to install. Doesn't anything like that even exist anywhere in the world?

Dropbox does offer premium plans with more space from what I recall.

Most likely that you can't give a direct link to the file to be downloaded, but have to go through the service's page to do so.

I'm skeptical if one would find a 100% completely free service out there that meets all of the stated and updated qualifications to satisfaction. Some of the options might come close or meet it with a smallish fee perhaps, but when it comes to paying recurring fees for something of this nature, my personal preference would be to get a really good monthly hosting package somewhere with full administrative control over the given server (VPS, hardware server or your own machine at a colo), and install CentOS 7 on it with OwnClowd (free open source dropbox like clone).

There are hosting options out there that one could run OwnCloud on for as low as $3 per month or less, or a bit more for additional control, making any monthly subscription fees of the centralized solutions like Dropbox/Google and other options unattractive (to me anyway) due to the privacy aspect and other factors.

Might even be possible to find free hosting with this functionality available, but my experience with free hosting is that you get what you pay for, and any free offerings can end abruptly with no warning, which for a solution of this particular nature could result in permanent data loss depending on various factors.

Well I don't need to worry about data loss because I'll keep backups on thumb drives. The reason I want this is not for data backup but rather just for file sharing and I don't know of any other way to do it.

And I'm not sure that I like all this "cloud" talk because it seems to all involve synchronization.

What I really need is perhaps something similar to Hotline but that doesn't store data on my hard drive - something remote, basically like an FTP site that I can just get a chunk of space, log in and upload/download files. I wouldn't think that would be so insanely hard to find.

And once again, it must be FREE, not 1 dollar/pound/peso/etc. per year, but FREE.

There is a saying that goes something like "when you get something for free, you are not the customer, but the product being sold". As you seem to be fairly concerned about privacy, that is something to think about.

Companies generally don't offer services for free if they don't expect to get something back for their costs of running said service. And if they do, they generally don't last very long.

Dropbox' free accounts are basically advertising - this is how awesome and easy our service is, wouldn't you want more sharing options and more than 2GB of space?

Google gets most of its income from other companies paying them to show ads, and they get more money by convincing said companies that the people are (mostly) shown ads that are related to their interests, and that they as such are more likely to click on said ads and follow through with a purchase. So they collect data about the user whenever the user uses their services, and they make the services free in order to entice people to use them.

All of them advertise synchronisation because that's a service that people generally want, but I can almost assure you that it is never necessary to use that function, and not even something that is enabled by default (you would need to install the service's application in order to sync, the browser can't just read the files on your computer without your permission, and you can almost? always use the service directly through the browser).

Really? Because the ones I've seen seemed to imply that they required it to be downloaded and installed, and that they always synchronized unconditionally. I may be wrong about that, but it just seemed that way from what I've read (they never seem to say exactly how it works).

But once again, the suggestion to pay for it must fall on deaf ears because it simply is not an option.