Recently I thought of setting up a webdav account. After googling, I have found a list of hosting companies that offer webdav hosting. Webdav hosting allows us to drag and drop files like a local folder. FTP or any such tool is not required. You can create files and folders like the way you create on your local disk.
From the list of webdav hosting providers I have chosen SqueakSoft.com which is running a free trial account offer for one month. I wanted to evaluate the service quality and applied for a free trial account. They have promptly created an account for me and sent me the details.
When I logged into the account what I saw was an empty dashboard with out any options or without any clue what should I do next. As I already know that Windows OS has webdav client, I have opened the url from IE’s File-> Open and selecting ‘Open as web folder’ check button.
IE was able to open the location like a normal folder but there are lots of issues I have observed. I am not sure if the issues are because of windows webdav client or with the webdav service itself. The problems I have observed are:
- When I right click and select New in the context menu, it shows only ‘Folder’ option. It does not show ‘File’ option. It means that I can’t create a new file directly on the server
- Does not allow to do ‘net use’ to the webdav server.
- It repetitively asks for username and password.
- File drag and drop did not work. It creates the file on the server but opening the file has given error that ‘the specified path is invalid’
Overall the experience was very poor. As I mentioned earlier I am not sure whether the problem is because of my webdav client. The client I used is webfolder provided by Microsoft in Windows XP. I will try few more service providers next and will update the post.