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, claiming that its customers have uploaded more than 10 petabytes of files onto its servers and can handle up to three million users simultaneously. As of October 2009[update], according to Alexa's three month average rating, Rapidshare.com is the 18th most visited website globally.RapidShare has two different websites, but both sites claim to be entirely different organizations and entities.[citation needed] The original site is RapidShare.de, which uses the German top-level domain ".de", and the organization has its central office in Cham, Switzerland.
On October 20, 2006, RapidShare announced that "Unfortunately all drives of RapidShare.de are full right now". 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.
Upon 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.
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 GB, 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. If an account is still valid is measured in seconds, not days. Thus, if you buy a 30 day account, its valid 30*86400 seconds. The timer starts with your first login. However, there seems to be a limit of the delay, so people can not hoard cheap accounts for ages. Every premium account is limited to a maximum of 150 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 5 GB per day. The user is allowed to "save" traffic up to a maximum of 25 GB and can then spend the saved traffic all at once.
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 May 2009, the downloads limit has been established for Premium Members at 5 gigabyte per day. The unused volume is automatically rolled over to the following day, up to a maximum limit of 25 gigabytes. If the complete download capacity is used up during one day, the premium-user is able to download another 5 gigabytes the following day (or after midnight CET).
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.
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