Purplenova

I am glad someone is offering a software like this. I tried it out and it looks pretty simple to use.

Works great and so simple to use.

I downloaded the software to test out the company’s claim that one can host from any internet connected computer “irrespective of network type”, and “without ever hearing of IP Addresses / firewalls / routers”. The installable was small, around 2.5 MB, and installed quite easily in minutes. The user-interface has a “Web 1.0” feeling to it, but it is uncluttered (there are just 6 menu items in all), so the user is unlikely to go wrong. I was able to host a file easily by selecting it from a dialog or with a drag-and-drop from the explorer. One can right click on the file to get its URL, and send the URL to a remote user who can enter it in a browser to obtain the said file.

When I hosted a directory containing a sample website, I only needed to share the URL of the home page, and the reader was able to navigate the links to see the entire website. I had a choice of either hosting files for public view or for private view. The company says that the publicly hosted content is crawled and indexed by popular search engines such as Google & Yahoo. The privately hosted content is accessible from the web with a username and a password.

The LITE version of Purplenova supports domain names. I was able to designate a home page quite easily, once my domain forwarding was taken care of by my domain provider. It worked instantly when I reconnected or moved my laptop, unlike the Dynamic DNS solutions which often take time. The PRO version of Purplenova allows the user to proxy to web-services running on IIS / Apache servers on the LAN. But this I thought was really for the advanced user.

On the whole, this seems like a neat “do-it-yourself” solution, for hosting and communicating files of any type and size