The Big File Hoster Comparison
If you're interested in a premium account with a file hoster, you have a huge selection of providers competing for users' attention. New websites for uploading and downloading files appear all the time. Others disappear again when their business model isn't profitable. That's especially frustrating if you still had an active premium subscription.
In this comparison, the most important criteria of the hosters are compared against each other. These include prices and terms, as well as the savings potential if you buy a premium account for a longer period. Download speeds and restrictions are also compared with each other.
On this page, you can discover all relevant providers and file hosters, read user reviews, and share your own experiences with the community. To stay especially safe when downloading from the hosters listed, we recommend using a VPN that hides your IP. The best providers are listed in our VPN Comparison.
What Matters When Choosing a File Hoster
The usage profile is naturally the deciding factor when choosing a file hoster. If you mainly want to use the service to upload your own files, it should offer as much storage space as possible on attractive terms. The next question is whether files can also be downloaded quickly and for free by others.
With many hosters, fast downloads are reserved for users with a premium account. In return, these hosters usually pay the uploader for downloads of their files. So if you want to earn a little extra, you should choose a hoster like this.
If you're mainly a consumer and download files from various sources, you should pay attention to how much download volume the file hoster allows. Often, a premium account only allows 30 to 50 GB of downloads per day, which adds up to as much as 1.5 TB per month. That sounds like a lot at first, but in practice you often want to download a large amount in a short time and then nothing at all for a while. That's why you should check whether the daily limit can be saved up or resets every day.
Some file hosters offer unlimited download volume, but they usually have fewer files available, since these are less attractive to uploaders.
File Hoster Premium Account vs. Free Use
As a user, you naturally wonder whether it's worth paying the monthly fee for a premium membership with a file hoster. As so often, it depends heavily on your usage habits and the provider. Some file hosters offer very high download speeds for free users, but these are often less popular online, because uploaders of files are paid less or not at all.
Many hosters limit download speeds to an extremely slow 50–150 kB/s to motivate users to buy a premium account. Often, a captcha that the user must solve before downloading is added on top. Premium is really only worth it if you download a lot in a row. In that case, it's also convenient to add the account to the download manager jDownloader and manage all your files there.
Multihosters as an Alternative to File Hosters
For several years now, alongside classic file hosters, there have been so-called multihosters, which are sometimes also called multi-OCH (OCH = One-Click Hoster, a synonym for file hoster). They give you access to various file hoster premium accounts with a single login. The offer is therefore aimed mainly at downloaders who occasionally want to download something from different hosters. A premium account with a single file hoster often only pays off if it's used a lot.
If you only occasionally download from various providers, you're better off with a membership at one of the many multihosters. They bundle the offer and usually cost about as much as a single premium account. The drawback of these shared services is, of course, that each individual user has significantly less download volume per hoster available than with a direct account.
Frequently Asked Questions About File Hosters
Here are questions and answers about file hosters