Rapidshare Alternatives: File Hoster shuts down March 31, 2015
The file hosting company Rapidshare AG just announced that it will shut down its services on March 31, 2015.
The notice, published on the service's front page on the Internet states that the company will stop its "active service" on the day and that accounts won't be accessible from that day on.
According to the information, accounts will be deleted and data won't be available anymore.
Rapidshare recommends to download files before the deadline to secure a copy of the data before it becomes unavailable.
The service, once one of the most popular file hosting and sharing destinations on the Internet, was in decline for years.
Back in 2012, it switched its business model to a file owner model where uploaders and not downloaders paid the company for the distribution of files.
While great for users who only downloaded from Rapidshare, use of the service dropped shortly thereafter when users who shared files using the service moved to alternatives on the Internet.
The Megaupload raid and takedown happened at the same time and many file hosting sites were suddenly in trouble because of their business model (limiting downloads, getting users to buy premium accounts, affiliate systems that allowed uploaders to benefit from the system).
The company had to lay off staff members just five months later and dropped its unlimited plans at the same time which irritated users who subscribed to it as they were now in a position where they either could pay a lot more to host their data on the site or migrate away from Rapidshare.
Then in May 2014, it dropped all free plans and increased the pricing of paid plans significantly (by the factor six) at the same time.
Back then it looked like a last effort to turn the company around but even then it was clear that the company could not find success with what it announced.
Today now the notice on the Rapidshare website. If you look back, it looks as if management made several ill-advised decisions that turned the company from being one of the most frequented destinations on the Internet into an unsustainable service.
But that is only a partial answer. Strong competition in form of file syncing solutions from companies like Amazon, Google, Dropbox or Microsoft became alternatives for users who just wanted to host their files on the Internet.
If you check Rapidshare's Alexa trend you notice that it dropped many places in the past two years and even left the top 10,000 sites mark in the United States recently.
Rapidshare Alternatives
Rapidshare users who are looking for alternatives may find the following services useful
- File Synchronization services: Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, SugarSync
- File Sharing services:Â Media Fire, Mega,SendSpace WikiUpload ZippyShare
Now You: What's your take on the development?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@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.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
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.
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)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
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.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.