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Filesharing sites tend to have pretty short lives, with most popular sites being forced to call it a day after a few years at most. Rapidshare has been though its share of ups and downs, but it has been around for a long time now, since it was first founded in 2002 almost 13 years ago. Now it's time as one of the top file hosting and sharing sites is coming to an end, with the Swiss company shutting down on the 31st of March, 2015
In 2009 it claimed to be hosting over 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users to its servers, while we don't know how much that has changed recently, this closure will definitely result in a lot of dead links to older content that the site hosted. Previously counted as one of the top 50 most used sites on the internet, Rapidshare has fallen a long way since then, now languishing at an Alexa rank of 5,006.
It seems that the rise of several other large file sharing sites such as Megaupload and now Mega in the last few years have hit the company pretty hard. In February 2014 it gave 23 out of 24 employees a choice to quit or be fired and has been running for the last year with only one employee, who was there to answer phones and deal with any paid account issues.
It has also been at the center of several court cases over the years, with various copyright holders taking action against it. As recently as 2013 it also tried to reinvent itself as a business cloud storage services provider, but it seems that this has not given it the profit that it needs to survive.
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KitGuru Says: While it is sad to see a well-known site close up shop and delete petabytes of files, it seems that this has been coming for a long time. Have you used Rapidshare at all over the years or are you fond of another file sharing site?
Source: ArsTechnica
Photo source: Wikimedia – Schulerst
That’s really sad to hear, especially about the fact that the staff had to be let off like that. I used to use this a few years ago but I noticed I’ve been seeing it less and less now you mention it. It’ll be a shame to see it gone
Really sad to hear they are leaving
I’m personally not sad at all to see it go – Rapidshare has always had some of the worst service.
The slowest speeds ontop of making you wait to download for free
Trying to push paid membership at every single oppurtunity
While these are problems that plague many Filesharing sites that aggressively push their paid membership there are much better alternatives…And there has been for a long time
Mediafire.com, Min.us, Mega.co.nz
Rapidshare was a terrible service that only got as big as it did for being one of the first.
And that’s why I’m glad Rapidshare will close. Rapidshare is really the worst service ever exists.