Large file hosting: try ADrive

Often, when I'm skiing or on some other excursion, I take large numbers of photos and want to distribute them to other people. So I need a web host that offers a lot of storage space and high download capacity.

There are a large number of free-ish or ad-supported file hosting services; Wikipedia offers a handy comparison guide.

The ones that everyone seems to use are MegaUpload and RapidShare. The problems with RapidShare are that it only allows you to share files up to 200 MB, and downloads from free accounts are very slow; MegaUpload allows files up to 1 GB, and downloads are speedier, but their flash-based upload interface never works successfully for me under Linux. Also, both sites are very gaudy and ugly and they make downloaders wait and solve CAPTCHAs in order to download files.

Recently I tried ADrive, and this one I like a lot.  Advantages:

• File size limit is 2 GB
• Free accounts get 50 GB of space
• Uploader is Java-based and very reliable
• You can organize your uploaded files into folders easily
• Pretty good download speeds... > 200 kB/s
• No waiting or CAPTCHAs to download files

So, ADrive gets my seal of approval.  Worth checking out if you need to share large files reliaby, and don't want to pay for it :)