Well, I did some experimenting.
Hotfile is OK, I like the ftp capability. It's definitely looking promising.
Seems it does have support folders. It's file-management is not the most user friendly, but it is sufficient.
I quite like that uploaded files go into a folder with the days date, which makes it easier to track your files down later.
6 months premium account for $35 is pretty good, wish they did a 3 month option though.
Netload is promising. It's fairly user unfriendly, but as you learn your way through it, it actually does most of what the other system do, just not as polished looking. It does ftp for premium accounts, and does support folders, but a bit clumsily. I think I could live with it for uploading, but I do worry if it may too unfriendly for casual downloaders. It's also german based, and certain parts aren't translated, which is fun
Mediafire is much more polished and user friendly, but uploads were horrifically slow for me. There is also no upload app or ftp support, and for some reason, the web interface doesn't always work correctly in firefox. It uses a flash based system, and while uploading, I was unable to minimize the uploading window as you are supposed to be able to because the 'hide' tag was was lost off the top of the page and you can't scroll it down to retrieve it. I could live with that, just open another window and carry on, but it's annoying. I have also found the latest version of the flash plug-in to be very buggy and prone to crashes which is worrying as this is the only method of uploading with mediafire.
I'm currently investigating another host, megashares. This is a new one to me, recommended by a friend. It has folder support, files upto 10gb size, files are retained for 90 days without download, premium account files unlimited.
I had problems with the standard browser based upload in firefox, but they have a java plug-in that seems to work quite well, and also support ftp and apparently there is a desktop app for premium accounts. Upload is slow, but no worse than others for me.
Premium accounts are quite cheap if you bulk buy, e.g. 1 month is $9.95, 3 months $19.95, 6months $34.95. They only seem to take paypal though, and accounts appear to be re-billed automatically, which I don't like.
One thing to note is that, unless you check the box when uploading, your files are public, they can be searched by others and downloaded or linked to by others. That's kind of the point with megashares, hence the name, mega
shares.
I'm waiting for some files to upload so I can then see how it all looks from a downloaders perspective.
I think I'm leaning towards hotfile right now, but we'll see.
EDIT : Well, I just did a web transfer of some of my files from rapidshare to Hotfile. Took a while to get it set up, I used rapidshare to get a download list of all my files, loaded it in a text editor, then used search/replace to get all the links in the appropriate format, then simply copy-pasted them into hotfiles 'remote upload' box half a dozen at a time.
There's a limit on how many you can transfer a day, and rapidshare complained about exceeding my traffic limit and upped my account package, but I'll complete the transfer in the next couple days so all will be good
munch