As we announced on Friday, we’re rolling out new premium accounts that provide members with big storage and data transfer upgrades over the free plan. And to show our appreciation to all our members, all premium upgrades now include a free trial period. Here’s how it works:

• All current users will receive their first month free with any upgrade
• New members will receive two free weeks with any premium subscription

We’re also providing custom plans for users who need a lot of storage but not a lot of bandwidth (or vice versa). Drop our Enterprise department a line for info. Enjoy the free trials!

As DivShare continues to grow, one of our biggest priorities is keeping you up to date on server upgrades, scheduled maintenance and unexpected downtime. To do that, we’ve created a new, off-site DivShare Maintenance Blog, which you can check out at at www.divshare.net. We’re hard at work making the site as relialble as possible, and the new blog will provide up-to-the-minute information on any maintenance that we’re planning or any problems that we’re experiencing. And you’ll always be able to access it — even if there’s a problem at our main datacenter.

So, don’t forget to bookmark DivShare.net and subscribe to the new feed. Stay tuned!

The blog is back, and we’ve got some great announcements about the future of DivShare. Over the past two months, we’ve been building up our network of servers, working with new partners and investors, even turning down some big buyout offers. Today, we’ll start to unveil the new features and changes that will make DivShare the most powerful and professional media and document-sharing tool on the web in 2008.

If you’ve been using the site this week, you may already have noticed a big improvement in download and page load speed. That’s just the beginning of the server upgrades and new features we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. The first round of changes — all of which will make DivShare a faster, more stable site for all our users — will affect the storage and bandwidth allowances on user accounts.

From here on out, free users will get 5 GB of storage space and 50 GB of downloads (data transfer) per month. Premium users will be able to upgrade to as much as 10 times that amount — and take advantage of ad-free pages, hotlinking, FTP uploading and more. You can check out all the plans on the new signup page.

So, the big questions: why are we making this change, and who will this affect? We’ve mapped out the new plans so that less than 1 in 10 current users will need to upgrade. In fact, 99% of users use less than 5 GB of storage, and 90% of users serve less than 50 GB of downloads each month. We’re making the change because a very small group of users is using a very large amount of bandwidth and storage space, and by doing so is degrading the DivShare experience for the rest of our 250,000 members. The new system will keep our servers much faster and more reliable, and members with lots of popular files will still be able to take advantage of DivShare through one of our upgraded accounts.

The new tracking system will go live tonight, but we’ll have a week grace period during which no accounts will be affected if they go over their storage or download limits. On January 24, you’ll need to be below the storage limit to upload a new file, and you’ll need to be below the download limit to serve new downloads.

As always, we love to hear your comments and suggestions, and we’re here to help anyone who has questions about how the changes may affect them. We’ll be updating the blog non-stop from here on out with new features, upgrade announcements, partnership news and more.

Enjoy the faster, more reliable site, and drop us a line any time.

Update: To reiterate, no files will be deleted as part of this change. You can keep all the files currently in your account, even if it’s over the storage limit. However, you will not be able to upload new files until you upgrade or make some extra room. Also, if you’re using a lot of space but not a lot of bandwidth, we can set you up with a custom account — just drop us an e-mail from the Enterprise page.