User:Parakeet59/exposer

exposer
Exposer allows a home computer to expose files (photos, music, videos, etc.) and let them be accessed from the Internet by friends and family : it is a free home-hosting program.

Advantages : -easy to set-up for unexperienced users (no configuration), even from behing a home router. -no limits for the number or type of shared files -no upload needed each time new photos are to be exposed. -no need to buy a domain name, an "exposer address" is created instead. -Miniature thumbnails of the exposed photos are created automatically. -makes it possible to created a home hosted web-site, too

Drawbacks : -The computer on which the shared data is has to stay on, although the screen can be shut down. -Cannot be installed on a company

Technical review :

Of course, Exposer is in fact a web-server, and it is specialized for home use, because Exposer gives a solution to the 4 common problems people have when they want to share files from their home:

-IP address given by the Internet Service Providers always changes : In an ideal world, when one wants to share a folder with friends, one would communicate one's IP, and friends could then type this IP in their browser's address and access the shared data. But most ISP give a different IP each time a home computer (or the home router) connects to the Internet. Thus this is impossible to inform friends and family of one's IP (which changes every day). Even buying a domain name does not solve the problem, since it would be unfeasible to refresh des dsn servers all around the world each day. Exposer solves this problem by using an integrated dynamic IP service that is very similar to the common dynamic DNS services available on the web (for instance dyndns.org). So one can inform one's friends of one's "exposer address", which never changes and points to the Exposer's integrated dynamic IP service, which knows of every IP change, and thus can redirect the visitor to the correct IP.

-Home computers are usually behind a router/firewall, and it does not allow requests from the Internet to pass through, and land on the computer on which the data is shared. Normally to open this path, a home user should define a "port redirection" (or "port forwarding") on the router, and this is a manipulation that may be a bit tricky for inexperienced people. Exposer helps solve this issue by either using the UPNP protocol, which makes the redirection automatically on UPNP-aware routers (all of them are since 2002), or by guidding the user through the different steps to do manually the redirection, and computing for her/him the information needed to fill-in the redirection form.

-most ISP block port 80 to discourage home-hosting, because port 80 is the default port for the web : when one types a URL in a browser, such as http://www.domain.org, the port 80 is used. To access a web-site that is responding on a different port, for instance 8080, the visitor of such a site would have to type http://www.domain.org:8080 and this is hard to memorise, of course. So, blocking port 80 is discouraging home-hosting. Exposer solves this with its integrated dynamic IP service, too, by redirecting the visitors to the correct IP address AND port.

-It may be very difficult for an average home user to set up a web server like Apache, or to configure IIS properly. Exposer does not require any configuration.