Free music and video hosting servers provide cost-effective media podcasts for small business web sites.

If you need remote disc space to store your data files, or a remote hosting server to furnish media files to your web site, consider a free hosting server such as FileAve, a division of Ripside Interactive. Free MP3 web hosting is an important consideration for small business owners wanting to put a voice behind the text of their web sites. The popular term for this is podcasting.

Free Music Hosting Servers

A search for free music or video hosting servers is likely to bring up dozens of viable options. A pleasant result of decreasing disc storage costs is that many sites are willing to offer relatively large amounts of storage space free or at relatively low cost.

There are many reasons a web site owner might want or need remote file storage. One might be security, providing an off-site storage of critical files to prevent loss due to a local disc crash or catastrophic building loss. Another reason might be to avoid or delay expenditures for additional disc storage.

MP3 Music and Audio

It's no longer enough to populate a web site with good text and images. Today's internet users expect to hear and see business owners and their products in action. That means audio and video files available for instant playback. These files can eat up enormous amounts of disc space and take large chunks of bandwidth for presentation.

If your web host permits embedded streaming these instructions will help you put MP3 files on your web site.

Free Web Hosting

Many personal and small business web sites utilize shared servers to reduce costs. Shared server environments typically prohibit or tax streaming audio and video. A solution to this problem is remote file hosting.

The Ideal Remote Web Host

Ideally, a remote file hosting server will have these characteristics:

• Free or relatively inexpensive,
• Sufficient storage space and bandwidth,
• Allow direct linking giving the appearance of co-location,
• Provide a secure, replicated server site,
• Serve files with no noticeable delay

FileAve Free Web Hosting

This writer chose FileAve to host small to medium sized audio files to play in a shared server environment that prohibits embedded streaming media. FileAve provides 50 MB of storage space and 1,024 MB/month of bandwidth in their free hosting server package.

Direct linking is permitted, meaning you can embed a media player in your web page and have a direct link to an MP3 or video file on the remote file host that will play the file when desired. All file types are supported, providing for data, image, audio, or video streaming.

Though many free web file servers insert a noticeable delay before serving files, the selected host server does not.

Establishing a Free MP3 Server Account

It's easy to establish a free server account. Though registration is required, credit card information is not. Upon registration and confirmation, an account is immediate and available. One caution, a sponsor intake form directly follows FileAve's registration, giving the impression it is a required input form. It is not.

MP3 File Upload

Files may be uploaded three at a time in a convenient browse and click upload screen common to many upload processes. An FTP access is available, though this writer found it difficult to utilize. Upon successful upload, it's easy to obtain a direct link to the file, which has the format: www.username.FileAve.com/filename. As an alternative, this free hosting server also provides HTML code with an embedded player that can be added directly to a web page.

Inactive Accounts

A caution: The selected free hosting server indicates inactive accounts will be purged after sixty days, but also recommends logging in every month to prevent data loss. Discretion would seem to dictate storing critical files with more than one remote file server.

Reliability

FileAve claims its servers are located in a highly secure data center, with redundant storage, multiple connections to the internet, and a large cluster of web servers to maintain hosting reliability.