Hello everyone. I started this thread in the hopes of finding effective ways of advertising a free file hosting website. There are a lot of free image hosting related threads, but I have not find any constructive advices given to free file hosting service. Now I used to own and operate a mixed free hosting service, ie both image and file hosting. It peaked at top 5,000 with Alexa ranking and slowly died off as I did not have the sufficient resources to cater for the growth. For those who are wondering, personally I feel that free image hosting is extremely easy to gain traffic. However, as the nature of free image hosting is rather explosive, it's very easy to go from zero to 100% capacity in one day, and as your service become paralyzed at 100%, your users start to leave and hop onto the next target the next day. With my previous experience in mind, I am reluctant to restart a similar website without sufficient resources and reserve in place. However, now that I am experimenting with a pure free file hosting service, I'm noticing the opposite. It's not as easy to lure others into using your service compared to a free image hosting service. The demand for a free file hosting service seems to be monopolized by the big few (MegaUpload, RapidShare etc), whereas for free image hosting, users are more happy to explore alternatives usually to host adult pictures as the big few like ImageShack.us does not allow for that. So yes, if you have any nice suggestions to advertise a free file hosting service I would love to hear about it. Or if you have questions about free image hosting I will try my best to answer (but be aware that my information might be outdated). Cheers.
You should think about building some quality backlinks to your site, this will improve your organic search engine traffic. You can write and submit articles to article directories, you can also add links in your signature on this site linking back to your website this will improve your serp.
Post on Craigslist. Someone (or two) will sure hear it and see it. Search and Find lists of free file servers (usually in forums or blogs) and add yours in to the list as well. Find your competitors and create a google alert for their domain names, and track what they are doing.
Thanks for the advice people. I did submitted my site to dmoz and craiglist as well as some other free site listings, most of them are taking quite a while to process my submission. :/ Also searched for free file servers, found this ancient forum that I haven't been visiting for a while... http://freewebspace.net. Seems like a goldmine to be active for a bit to advertise my service. They also feature a free file hosting directory and I promptly submitted my site there too.