RapidShare

RapidShare is a German-owned one-click hosting pay- and free-service (with certain restrictions and limitations) website that operates from Switzerland and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. Rapidshare is one of the world's largest file-hosting sites with millions of files stored on its servers. According to Alexa, Rapidshare.com is currently the 15^th most visited website globally

History

RapidShare has two different websites, but both sites claim to be entirely different organizations and entities. The original site is RapidShare.de, which uses the German top-level domain ".de", and the organization has its central office in Cham, Switzerland.^[2]

On October 20, 2006, RapidShare announced that "Unfortunately all drives of RapidShare.de are full right now".^[3] A new website, RapidShare.com was set up in an attempt to transfer usage from RapidShare.de to RapidShare.com.^{[citation needed]} When the new Rapidshare.com was launched, holders of "Premium" accounts at the time on RapidShare.de were able to use both the RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com, until their account expired. It is not possible, however, to use a RapidShare.com account on the German site.

Operation and services

On uploading the user is supplied with a unique download URL which enables anyone, with whom the uploader shares it, to download the file. No user is allowed to search the server for content; all files have to be downloaded by following a given URL.

RapidShare stated in April 2008 that it had 240 gigabit/s of Internet connectivity and 5.4 petabytes of storage for users.^[4]

Non-paying users are required to wait 30 to 134 seconds, depending on the filesize, before the download starts and their download-speed is limited from 25 KB/s up to 250 KB/s (depending on the server-load). In October 2008, Rapidshare extended the waiting time to 15 minutes between each download.

Registration and payment allow benefits such as unlimited download speed, download of several files simultaneously, queue skipping, the facility to interrupt and re-start downloads, uploading and downloading bigger files up to 2 GBs, allowing Free Users to download their files with Premium privileges ("TrafficShare") and to store up to 500 GB of data that can not expire.

Premium accounts last for a certain number of days, with a day marked at midnight Central European Time. Thus a 30-day account opened at 11:59pm CET would have 29 days to run after one minute. Every premium account is limited to a maximum of 80 GB download traffic per month, divided equally over every day of the month. If there are 30 days in a month, then the user will receive 2.67 GB per day. The user is allowed to "save" traffic up to a maximum of 12 GB and can then spend the saved traffic all at once.^[5]

There is now a rewards program that allows the user to trade "RapidPoints" for a selection of products depending on the amount of points the user has collected.

As of October 2008, the download limit has been established for Premium Members at 2.66 Gigabyte per day. The unused volume is automatically rolled over to the following day, up to a maximum limit of 12 gigabytes. If the complete download capacity is used up during one day, the premium-user is able to download another 2.66 gigabyte the following day (or after midnight CET).

Also, as of (at least) 24 October 2008^[6], files that are not uploaded with a Premium or Collector's Account, may only be downloaded ten times: "This file is neither allocated to a Premium Account, or a Collector's Account, and can therefore only be downloaded 10 times."^[7]

The Rapidshare service is subject to frequent alterations, such as the size of the traffic allowances and the policies for their application. Users are notified of changes via the 'News' page on the Rapidshare website.

Software

Rapidshare offers two computer programs to simplify file managing:

Rapidshare Uploader

This software allows queuing of uploads. However, it cannot resume interrupted uploads. It is available for Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP and runs without installation.^[8]

Rapidshare Manager

This software has many more features than the Uploader, especially queuing and resuming of up- and downloads, but is only available for Windows Vista.