Tom Denton is the founder of MediaFire. Visit the company blog here.

How and when did MediaFire get started?

In August 2006, we began discussing the feasibility of developing a site like MediaFire. The idea originally came from our own frustration with the state of the file hosting industry last year. As graphic designers and developers ourselves, we frequently e-mailed large files and often needed to share files with multiple people at once. We could have used FTP to upload files to our own servers, but even for experienced professionals, it’s a bit of a hassle. File hosting web sites had been around for a while but not a single one of them had figured out the formula for making an intuitive, simple, easy-to-use site. What we saw was the opportunity to make the whole process of storing and sharing data online as simple as possible. We officially launched our first version on October 20, 2006.

What are some current facts and figures?

MediaFire is continuing to grow quickly, but here are some recent stats from this week. MediaFire is currently hosting about 2.6 million files and serves about 1 million page views daily. We currently serve over 325,000 registered users and many unregistered users who upload over 30,000 more files daily. At any given time, MediaFire is serving over 10,000 simultaneous file downloads.

In less than a year after launching, MediaFire is already among the web’s top few hundred websites based on Alexa's traffic rankings. How did you accomplish such extraordinary growth?

The growth rate has surpassed our own high expectations. We had a fairly quiet launch, originally making the site publicly accessible on October 20th, 2006. It only took about three days before MediaFire started to catch on and by the 24th we were front page news on Digg.com (thanks to Folksonomy.org), Del.icio.us, and LifeHacker.com. I think one of the key factors in our success was being able to handle this kind of attention so early on. While the concept and user interface of MediaFire are relatively simple, a great deal of time is spent on producing a truly industry leading intelligent data distribution system that runs everything behind the scenes. Without a solid infrastructure, the site probably would have crumbled under that initial load but instead, it allowed us to successfully serve the enormous traffic surge and earn us an early reputation for speed and reliability.

Another one of the core values we have at MediaFire is listening to the feedback of our community. I credit a lot of our success to the generosity of our loyal users, who provide invaluable real-world feedback and suggestions daily. Since the beginning, we’ve had a very user-centric view on the functionality of the site and every update we make is usually at the request of our users. We’ve literally received thousands of emails from our users giving us their feedback on just about every aspect of the site. About a month ago, we quietly launched a completely new version of MediaFire which now incorporates all of the most frequently requested features from our first six months of operation. We’ve still got a long way to go until we realize the site’s full potential but the response from our users has already been outstanding.

How much funding have you taken so far?

MediaFire is currently completely Angel funded and while I can’t really say much more than that, I can say that we currently have enough invested to supplement our revenue and allow us to continue expanding into the foreseeable future. That being said, we may seek venture capital later this year.

Many people doubted the claims of unlimited storage space for free when you first launched, yet the company has kept its promises. How have you accomplished this?

Obviously, file hosting is a fairly expensive venture for anyone to undertake. It’s a market with high barriers to entry and it can put a great deal of stress on any infrastructure. I think a lot of people thought it would be impossible for a site like MediaFire to offer unlimited file hosting without some sort of catch and early on this caused a fair amount of controversy and discussion in the blogosphere. MediaFire is still advertising supported and we do our best to minimize the extent to which the ads impose on the user experience. Providing free and unlimited file hosting for everyone has always been the goal that pushes MediaFire forward, so it’s been part of the plan all along, despite obstacles along the path.

We have also spent an enormous amount of time developing custom back-end software to allow us to scale many times larger than we are now. We have a fully distributed infrastructure which will help us scale very quickly in the future as well. We launched with a large infrastructure and thankfully, despite some bumps in the road and unforeseen challenges, we’ve been quite successful in staying ahead of the demand curve.