About a year and half ago, Dan and I had a crazy idea to see if we can build a complete, fully functioning web site to send large files of up to 1GB to someone (files that email programs typically reject) in just a weekend. After just 20 hours of development, on Sunday, June 5th, 2005, TransferBigFiles.com was born. We documented the making of TransferBigFiles.com if anyone is interested.
TransferBigFiles.com (TBF) allows visitors, without registeration of any kind, to freely send a file from their machine to anyone on the Internet using the TBF servers as a proxy. You can even password protect the files to enhance privacy. It's super easy and works like a charm. Here are some cool statistics about TransferBigFiles.com:
- 284,347 - Total number of files sent through TBF
- 729,149 - Times the above files were downloaded
- 15,725 GB - The cumulative file size of the files sent
- 72,618 GB - The bandwidth used to transfer these files
- $18,000 - The approximate cost of the bandwidth usage (paid for by Axosoft)
- 5,000 - The approximate number of files that go through TBF in a typical day
But what's really amazing about the project is that in more than a year and half of flawless operations, we've hardly touched the site since the initial weekend. Old files are automatically cleaned up, emails automatically sent and statistics automatically updated without any maintenance work required by a human. In fact, the statistics above would have been significantly higher if we hadn't throttled the bandwidth to save on costs, since it had no way to recoup its bandwidth expenses.
In the last week, we've added unobtrusive Google Adwords to the download page and increased the bandwidth limit allowing the site to recoup some of the bandwidth costs. The result is an awesome transfer rate. I can now obtain 1MB/sec downloads from TBF.com!