General Want to offer content but short on website file space?

[Tracy]

Don't forget... if you have a Google account, you have 15GB of storage (realize, that is combined with your email and files).
You also have the Google Drive area you can offer content from as long as you realize that they DO have limits on the daily downloads from it.
I have a few "spare" gmail accounts set up and I frequently use them (since they are related to the site) as a location to offer downloads from the XenForo Resources add-on since they are not likely to be a high traffic item. It allow sme to free up space on my site but still offer those downloads that are not going to be in high enough demand to disable the access.

As admins of our sites, we need to be especially conscious of offerings that allow us to extend our end-user offerings while minimizing our out of pocket expenses.
As an example... I give you this. Every Meade related manual is hosted on a Google drive.

 

[joelr]

I'm not as familiar with XFMG, but it sounds like they allow uploading of resources (or rather, linking to resources) from any external link

 

[desbest]

Google Drive are closing down the loopholes that offered virtually infinite storage, due to the primary factor of cryptocurrency mining causing a worldwide electronics shortage for processors and hard drives. Other global events like America increasing the Federal Interest Rate, Ukraine War, Israel and Gaza war and the huge resources needed for training a LLM for AI along with compute for AI, just added fuel the fire. Microsoft Azure has had to selectively temporarily decline new corporate customers, so the days of lax enforcement on loopholes to get unlimited space from Big Tech companies is now over.

Google has now

• Closed the loophole where files in your trash wouldn't be counted towards your overall storage, as they'll be automatically deleted after 30 days
• Being more stringent and no longer lax, on the Inactivity Policy where unused accounts will have all their content deleted on Blogger, Youtube and Google Drive
• They've stopped selling their unlimited space Google Drive plan. Microsoft, Crashplan and Amazon Cloud Drive also ended their unlimited plan.
• Pictures and videos uploaded to Blogger now count towards an account's overall storage
• Youtube and Google Drive having a policy of terminating accounts which are not economically sustainable (profitable for data mining from personalised advertising)
• Deleting duplicate accounts which were solely created to get more free storage
• Closing down loopholes that allowed people to hotlink media files like videos to be embedded into external video players. And even if they still allow it, they're definitely putting in "rate limiting", "user throttling" and "usage quotas".
• Asking for ID to get a Google account, if your ip address appears to be suspicious for sockpuppet (duplicate) accounts or spam
• And more

I wouldn't be surprised if Google Drive frantically deleted your account on a whim.

If you want a free file host that supports hotlinking, I recommend Catbox.

 

[Tracy]

I'm not as familiar with XFMG, but it sounds like they allow uploading of resources (or rather, linking to resources) from any external link

I don't think that the media gallery (XFMG) is set up for it natively.
But the resource manager (XFRM) can use either uploaded file, linked to another site/file, external purchase (basically linked to another site) or fileless (the resource done in the text editor) for the content type.

It's a nice package and was honestly better than the offering in several ways of Invision when I ran it.
The problem is both XFRM and XFMG have been neglected over the years on feature updates when compared to the core script.

 

[Tracy]

If you want a free file host that supports hotlinking, I recommend Catbox.

They appear to have "limitations" also.

You cannot use Catbox for commercial services without prior approval. Examples include: a CDN (Content Delivery Network); image host for your business/ecommerce site (embedding hotlinks to Catbox files on your Wordpress site); or as source for videos that are streamed on sites other than files.catbox.moe directly.

What constitutes "commercial"? How hard is it to get "prior approval"?
It also looks like this is something ran by an individual?
Then you have the issues with it not being able to be connected to by certain locations/ISP networks.
https://catbox.moe/faq.php

As for Google... they've counted your email and files in google drive into the same pot for years. They even do it with my personal WorkSpace accounts (2TB pooled for each account) and the ones for several businesses I support. So that is nothing new.
And for me, each of the "spare" email accounts on Google are tied to a site that I run and they get associated activity like regular gmail account. For my heavy lifting stuff I use their paid tier.

Most of what you listed is them protecting their infrastructure from abuse by certain people that were not happy with what they were being given for free. Not new in society to be given something for free then certain people want more and start figuring out ways to abuse the system to get it. Those that do that end up impacting everyone.

 

[desbest]

And for me, each of the "spare" email accounts on Google are tied to a site that I run and they get associated activity like regular gmail account. For my heavy lifting stuff I use their paid tier.

How many Google Drive accounts do you have and how many of them are you paying for?
Would Google be happy to know that the zero price would be more than one?

 

[Tracy]

How many Google Drive accounts do you have and how many of them are you paying for?
Would Google be happy to know that the zero price would be more than one?

I have 3 gmail accounts associated with websites as a "user". Of those 3, one use Google Drive (approximately 1.8GB space used), with the other two strictly using email and normally the mailbox never exceeds about 10mb.
Considering that the impact on their system is negligible for those 3 accounts, I really don't think they would care as none of their "special mean detection routines" have trigged on them over the last 5 years of their existence. They don't get abused or attempts made to get around their imposed limits, like leaving a few TB in the trash forever and linking to them. It's those that try to game what they offer that Google has the biggest issues with.

I have 5 Workspace accounts associated with various domains. Two of those Workspace accounts do use Google Drive for various purposes with email not being a high priority for them (other than some basic website functions). So if I chose to, it would be easy to have all the files linked to my domain ones, but it is (for tracking) easier to keep bespoke accounts.

I also know several folks that use distinct gmail accounts for their bounce and unsubscribe functions in XenForo, and have done so for years with no issues. Again, they don't try to find loopholes to get more than what is basically offered.