Rapidshare switches to file owner paid hosting model

Martin Brinkmann
Nov 8, 2012
Updated • Dec 31, 2012
Internet
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The popular file hosting provider Rapidshare announced today that it will switch its current business model to a new system starting November 27, 2012. The new system moves the file host closer to a classic hosting system where  file owners pay for storage space and traffic created by file downloads.

News that Rapidshare was about to change its business model came to light at the end of October 2012 when existing download limits were lifted by the hosting company. The announcement in October vaguely referred to an upcoming change that would change the company's business model to make it an effective instrument against online piracy and a shield against future disagreements with content creators.

Rapidshare notes in the announcement that the pricing won't change, and that paying users of the service get unlimited traffic for their own files and downloads of their contacts. In addition, they get 30 Gigabyte of public traffic per day which other users of Rapidshare can make use of to download files hosted by a RapidPro user. Files uploaded by free Rapidshare account owners are limited to 1 Gigabyte of traffic per day, again with the exception that traffic by the user or contacts of the user does not fall under that limit.

Free users benefit from the change as there won't be any download limitations at all for their Rapidshare downloads. The company notes that downloads are unrestricted for all users of the service, regardless whether they are free users, free account owners or paying RapidPro members.

In the future RapidShare will use a classic hosting model which means that not only the storage space but also the traffic created will be paid solely by the owner of the file. The prices will not change. With RapidPro you automatically have unlimited traffic for your own downloads of your files and the downloads by your contacts. Additionally you have 30 GB public traffic per day. The recipients of your files have no download limitations whatsoever regardless of if they have RapidPro, a free account or no account at all!

The core idea behind the change is to prevent massive scale copyright infringements by limiting the outgoing public bandwidth for each user of the service to 30 Gigabyte per day. While that may still sound like much, it is not really a lot if you consider that his equals less than 400 mp3 album downloads, 100 TV episodes, 40 movies or 8 DVDs releases per day.

The hosting model change will have significant effect on users who earned money from Rapidshare in the past. Users who wanted to download files previously either had to do so slowly and over a long period of time, or fast and directly by buying RapidPro points which enabled the faster downloads for them. The incentive to upgrade to a premium account is not there anymore, as downloads are no longer limited by the hosting company.

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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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