File Hosting Without AWS

Standing up file hosting on a raw hyperscaler the first time is a configuration project, not a coding task. Before you write a single line that uploads a file, you create a bucket, decide on a region, turn off public-access blocks (carefully), write a bucket policy or ACL, mint an IAM user with a scoped policy, generate access keys, store them in a secret manager, add a CORS rule so browsers stop throwing opaque preflight errors, then stand up a CDN distribution, point it at the bucket as an origin, lock the origin down with origin access control, request and validate a TLS certificate, and add the DNS records for your custom domain.

Half a day later you can finally serve one PNG. files.link collapses that entire setup phase: you sign up, add a card, create an API key, and the upload + global CDN are already wired together. There is nothing to provision.

The real upload flow is three calls. First, POST /v1/files/{folderId} with your raw API key in the Authorization header (no Bearer prefix) and the filenames you want; the response is { success, urls: [{ url, id, ... }] }. Second, PUT each file's bytes straight to the returned presigned url — that write goes to storage directly, so your server never proxies the payload.

Third, POST /v1/files/confirm-upload with { ids: [...] } to finalize. A curl version of step one looks like: curl -X POST https://files.link/v1/files/FOLDER_ID -H 'Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"files":[{"name":"logo.png"}]}'. No SDK, no credential chain, no region string baked into a config object.

The trade is honest. files.link is a managed service: you do not get to attach a Lambda to an upload event, fan out to SNS, or hang an internal IAM role off an object. If your architecture is deep inside one cloud's event graph, DIY hosting is genuinely the better fit and you should keep it. But for shipping a product where files just need to land somewhere and be served fast over a global CDN, skipping the access-policy-and-distribution marathon is the whole point.

Cost is prepaid credits rather than a metered bill that surprises you at month-end, so you can reason about spend up front instead of decoding a line-item invoice.