In order to help my clients and I share files, I’ve been running an FTP site on my servers for the past year and a half, and it has been a good thing, but…

It represents one more “face” to my servers that hackers attempt to attack.  My protection hardware and software are all up to date and I keep them patched, but they report with monotonous regularity people attacking my websites and my ftp.  My websites I have no choice about, I need them, so I will live with the overhead that represents to keep it safe, but my ftp site… With latest attack on my ftp, I finally stood back and said with all the “free” products out there that can do everything my ftp site can do with as much security, why am I continuing to front the cost of maintenance.

And in the end I decided, Ah forget it.  So I’m shutting down my FTP server and "moving" those services to Microsoft’s Live SkyDrive.  So what is SkyDrive? well it’s Microsoft trying to stay ahead of Google, basically and due to its integration with Windows Azure (a development sphere I am moving into) I’ve decide to go with it.  Now it does have one limitation on the public site, and that is, while you get 50 gig, you can only store files up to 50 meg in size.  Well the answer for that is if I have a need to do a bigger file, I’ll setup a Mesh folder (see Microsoft Mesh), and share it with the client for that specific purpose.

I urge you to check out SkyDrive and Microsoft Mesh and ask you self “Why am I spending time and money maintaining an FTP site?”