Zip file hosting: what actually works, and when to skip the zip
Someone sends you a link. You click it, a 40MB archive drops into your downloads folder, you unzip it, and now there are nine files sitting on your desktop with names like final_v3_USE_THIS.pdf and no clue which one you were supposed to open first.
That is zip file hosting working exactly as designed. Which tells you something.
The job itself is simple. You have an archive, someone else needs it, and email attachment limits have said no. You upload it somewhere, you get a URL, you send the URL. That is the entire category. The interesting question is not which host has the biggest upload cap, it is whether you should be sending a zip at all.
What zip file hosting actually gives you
A place to put the archive and a link that points at it. In most cases that is genuinely all you are buying.
The differences between hosts come down to four things: how big a file you can upload, how long the link stays alive, whether the recipient needs an account to get at it, and whether you find out anything at all about what happened after you hit send. That last one is where nearly every option falls over, and I will come back to it.
Worth being clear about what a zip does not do. It will not compress a PDF or a JPEG in any meaningful way, because both are already compressed, so zipping a folder of holiday photos saves you almost nothing. What it does is bundle many things into one thing, which matters when the alternative is attaching eleven files to an email.
So the honest use case for a zip is bundling, not shrinking. Hold that thought. Why you are hosting the archive at all rather than attaching it is the subject of sending zip files by email.
The options worth knowing about
WeTransfer, for the one-off send
Still the default for most people, and for good reason: no account needed on either end, and the recipient experience is about as low-friction as it gets. The catch is that the free plan is much tighter than it used to be. Their plan limits page puts the free tier at up to 10 transfers or 3GB total in a rolling 30 day window, which is fine for occasional use and immediately annoying if sending files is part of your actual job.
Links expire by default, which is either the feature or the problem depending on why you are sending.
Google Drive and Dropbox, for the thing you will send again
If the archive is going to more than one person, or you will need to resend it in three weeks, put it in cloud storage and share the folder link. Google gives every account 15GB free across the whole account, and Drive will take an individual file up to 5TB, so size is not going to be your constraint. Dropbox Basic is 2GB free, which is small, though Dropbox link sharing is still the cleanest of the big three in my experience.
The friction here is permissions. Half the "can you resend this, I can't open it" emails I have ever received were a Drive link set to the wrong sharing setting. Check it before you send, every time.
Dedicated zip hosts, for static sites and dev handoffs
A whole class of tools exists purely to take a zip and hand back a URL, some of which unzip the archive and serve it as a live site. Tiiny Host is the one most people land on. Genuinely useful if the zip is a built static site or a design handoff, mostly pointless if it is four PDFs and a spreadsheet.
Object storage, if you are technical and doing this at volume
S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2. Permanent URL, no expiry unless you set one, and costs that round to nothing at the sizes most people work with. You also get to write a bucket policy on a Tuesday afternoon. Fine if you already live in that world, overkill if you do not.
Where LiveDocument sits, and where it does not
I should say this plainly since it is my product and I would rather be useful than coy. LiveDocument does not host zip files. It takes a PDF or an image, lets you record a video walkthrough over it, and gives you one link that carries both, with page-level analytics on what the reader actually did. If your archive is a build artefact or a folder of raw photos, use one of the options above and ignore me.
But if the zip you are about to upload contains a proposal, a deck, a report or a one-pager, the zip is the problem, not the hosting. That is the next section.
A zip is a dead end for anything you want someone to read
Every zip you send costs the reader four steps before they see a single word: click, download, find the file, unzip, open the right one. Five, actually. And every one of those steps is a place where someone gets distracted, gets pulled into a meeting, or decides they will look at it properly later. Later being the most expensive word in sales.
I spent years in growth roles sending bundles like this. Deck, two case studies, a pricing sheet, sometimes a security one-pager because someone in procurement had asked. Zipping it felt organised. It felt like I was making their life easier by putting everything in one place. What I was actually doing was handing someone a filing job and hoping they were in the mood for it.
And then nothing comes back, and you have no idea whether the deck was the problem, the pricing was the problem, or they never got past the download.
A sent archive is not a read archive. You cannot even tell which of those nine files got opened, which is the part that would have been useful.
When the zip is really a document, stop zipping it
The fix is boring and it works: send one thing, and make the one thing openable in a browser.
If it is genuinely several documents, merge them into a single PDF in the order you want them read. Acrobat does this, Preview on a Mac does this, and there are a dozen free web tools that do it in about eight seconds. You lose the folder structure and gain a reader who actually gets to page four.
Then host that PDF somewhere that gives you a link rather than a download. Turning a file into a URL is a different job from archiving it, and the tools are different too. Drive will do it. So will most PDF sharing sites. The point is that the recipient clicks once and is looking at your content, rather than clicking once and being handed homework.
And if the document matters enough that you want to know whether it landed, pick something that tells you. Knowing a link was opened is a start. Knowing which pages held attention and which got skipped is what actually changes your follow-up, and it is why I ended up building LiveDocument instead of carrying on with the guesswork. It is not storage and it will not take your zip.
FAQ
What is the best free zip file hosting?
For a one-off send to one person, WeTransfer, as long as you are inside the free tier's 10 transfers or 3GB per month. For anything you will send more than once, Google Drive's 15GB free is more useful because the link stays put and you can update the file without changing the URL.
Should I zip PDFs before sending them?
Only if there are several and they genuinely need to travel together. Zipping does not shrink a PDF in any useful way, since PDFs are already compressed, so the only thing you gain is bundling. If it is one document, send the document.
The mistake is upstream
Zip file hosting is a solved problem and none of the options are bad at it. What goes wrong happens earlier, when you reach for a zip and what you actually have is a document you want someone to read.
I built LiveDocument because I got tired of sending things into the void and guessing. If that is a feeling you recognise, it is at livedocument.com.
About the Author
Cameron JamesCameron is the founder of LiveDocument. He writes about sharing documents, PDFs, decks and contracts, and why pairing a video walkthrough with a document beats sending it cold.