There are quite a few different ways you can download files. Obviously, this site has a pro-premium account focus with a special push towards using multihoster services like Linksnappy, but there are other options. It wasn’t that long ago, really, when I hadn’t yet purchased my first premium account (from Hotfile or Fileserve I think) and I relied heavily on the increasingly-risky bittorrent downloads and free downloads from filehosting sites. There was a time when I knew about premium accounts and yet was not ready or willing to pay for premium services to download files faster.

Maybe you’re in that same boat. Maybe you’ve read about the benefits of purchasing a premium account from sites like Nitroflare, Keep2share, Rapidgator or Datafile or maybe you’ve even heard about multihoster services like Linksnappy or Putdrive. You know they help you download more files faster, but really aren’t sure if the purchase price will be worth the benefits for you, personally.

Even though I can’t make that choice for you, I can outline some of the pros and cons of using a multihoster service as well as some relative guidelines for when to choose what for downloading files that may help you make your decision a little easier.

The bad thing about Multihoster services

Jumping right into it, what I feel is the worst part of multihoster services, the biggest drawback to buying an account, is that they cannot guarantee 100% support for any filehosting site 100% of the time. I mean, unless the multihoster owns a filehosting site, anyway. Then those odds go way up of having 100% availability. But, the point here is that there is always a chance of a multihoster service losing the ability to offer access to premium downloads from a particular filehosting site.

Let’s take Linksnappy for instance. I’ve been playing around with their torrent downloader tool (I like it a lot) and have been using the account off and on lately. Right now with a Linksnappy Elite account, you can download from some of these filehosting sites as a premium member:

  • Rapidgator
  • Uploaded.net
  • Turbobit
  • Datafile
  • Depfile
  • Filepost
  • Filefactory

And a bunch more. The thing is, in the past they also supported Keep2Share and Nitroflare. Which, you can see that in these videos I created here. While Linksnappy still supports Keep2share, there have been occasions where you couldn’t download from Keep2Share using your Linksnappy account. And, with Nitroflare, they just flat-out stopped supporting Nitroflare even though it was formerly supported. Which, that does happen sometimes with multihosters: they will offer premium access to a site and it might either temporarily break or they might stop supporting a particular site indefinitely.

Because of this, my first word of advice is this:

Never buy a multihoster account if you need premium access to a particular filehosting site!

Sure, you may do really well purchasing a multihoster account from Zevera or Linksnappy and needing to download Datafile, Uploaded.to, Rapidgator or others’ hosted files. However, there’s a risk there. And, despite whatever you hear from a multihoster service, generally speaking in most cases, if a particular filehoster stops working with a multihoster service that is supposed to support it, it’s usually because the multihoster needs to fix something. Certainly not always, but as a general rule it’s the multihoster that needs to change something even though, again as a general rule, it’s the filehosting site that “broke” it. This is how the multihoster / filehoster game works, unfortunately.

Sometimes filehosting sites stop working right for their own premium account members, but it’s less likely to happen than a multihoster suddenly losing the ability to offer downloads to a particular filehosting site.

I’m not recommending against using multihosters because I absolutely do endorse these types of services and have several accounts with several multihoster service providers myself. I’m just saying that if you regularly download from only a particular filehosting site, such as Nitroflare or Depfile, you’re probably going to be better off purchasing a premium account from those respective services. You can still buy and use a multihoster account, but it really only makes sense if you can download files from several different filehosting sites.

How fast can you download?

Multihoster services and premium accounts have two major benefits over free downloads:

  • Faster download speeds than free downloads allow (usually, almost always)
  • The ability to download files in parallel, or to download multiple files simultaneously

However, if you only have access to slow or not-too-fast internet, the core benefits of using premium accounts to download files diminishes. Moreover, if you have very small monthly bandwidth caps through your ISP, being able to download a lot of files fast really won’t help you out much if downloading those files uses up all your available bandwidth. If your ISP imposes a limiting monthly bandwidth cap, you can still use a multihoster service although I’d recommend using one that offers bandwidth-only packages without expiration dates. But, if your download speed is limited to 200KB/s or lower or you only have 5-10GB of bandwidth available to you for a month, it probably wouldn’t be a good investment to purchase a premium account or use a premium multihoster service.

Which filehosters are available to you?

Whether or not a multihoster account makes sense for you largely depends on how many filehosting sites you can use to download the files you want. If you regularly download files from a forum that uses Rapidgator and Uploaded.net almost exclusively, a multihoster service probably won’t be the best option for you for reasons outlined above.

However, if you’re like me and you’re seeing 10+ different filehosters’ download pages represented where you download files, this is when buying a multihoster account makes the most sense. Personally, I don’t care which filehosting service I use to download files: what I care about is whether the downloads are nag-free and that the files download relatively quickly. That’s why you purchase a premium multihoster account: to skip the download delay timers, hourly or daily file or filesize caps, to avoid the ads, to get one-click downloads and to download files fast or relatively fast. At least that I’ve seen, very, very few filehosting sites offer the sheer speed that Megaupload used to offer, even to free members. That’s unfortunate, but compared to “free” downloads, which are cumbersome and slow, premium-account downloads are the way to go, and in the right situations, a premium multihoster account provides the best value with way more freedom than a single premium account could ever offer.

Should you purchase a multihoster account?

Unfortunately, there is no “one size fits all” answer to this question. If you have the money to spare and you want to see what new freedoms you can find using a multihoster vs free downloads or instead of using one premium filehoster, I think it’s certainly worth a try. I’ve had good success with Linksnappy, and like their torrent download tool, which I will review as soon as I can.

While I can’t answer this question for you, I can tell you what I might do in various situations:

  • If I only downloaded from one filehosting site primarily, I’d go with a single premium account from that site.
  • If I didn’t have money to spend on better downloads, I would use free downloads and try to figure out how to bypass the download limits.
  • If I only downloaded files occasionally but still wanted the benefits of using premium accounts, I’d pick a multihoster that offered data accounts versus monthly accounts.
  • If I had really slow internet or low monthly bandwidth caps, I’d find a local hotspot to download files from or potentially build myself a high-powered wifi booster… (maybe you shouldn’t do that, though…)

After using multihoster services for several years, I can say that they certainly aren’t for everybody. There are quirks, there are negative points and there are going to be occasional problems, at least, with every single service you use. But, because of the increased privacy and better download speeds, I am an avid fan(boy) of multihoster services & do recommend them as I continue to use them month after month.

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