TIL: Public File Hosting with 0x0.st

Sometimes you run into a truly inspirational piece of software that it’s a wonder even exists. I found 0x0.st recently and it very much falls into this bucket.

It’s essentially a simple, no-account, temporary file hosting site where you can just upload a file using a simple HTTP POST and the site will host it for you for between 30 days and 1 year depending on the size of the file. Uploading a file is as simple as:

curl -F '[email protected]' https://0x0.st

and you’ll get back a URL that you can share or use in the future.

I thought all the services like this had long since disappeared especially in the age of increasing scrutiny by government of content that websites host. It turns out though that from this discussion on HN, there are actually a bunch of similar services (transfer.sh, bashupload.com, chunk.io) but 0x0.st was the only one which I was able to access without an error.

I’m particularly impressed by the transparency of the owner of 0x0.st about the challenges they face and how they deal with the problems of abuse, malware etc. Many of these are precisely what I thought were insurmountable of hosting a service like this but apparently there are people out there willing to overcome them!