RapidShare

Veteran among hosters RapidShare stops working March 31, 2015. A message about this appeared on the main page of the site.

After this day, all accounts will be deleted.

The Swiss company began work in 2002 and since then has consistently fought with the owners, who accused her of piracy.
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RapidShare denied the allegations and continued to pay those who placed files with her. Then he still had to abandon this practice in order to get rid of the charges of encouraging piracy.

In 2008, its share in all web traffic reached 5% , and among downloads on direct links - 50%. The company received the main advertising revenue, including aggressive erotic and pornographic pop-ups. For this, her and similar sites began to be called “file dumping machines” - a place where it is disgusting to go.

Later paid accounts became the main source of income.

In 2010, Rapidshare had to hire a full-time lawyer to deal with the ongoing attacks of rights holders. In this mode, managed to stretch another four years, but no more.

The situation was aggravated by the fact that the special services paid attention to the file storage. Documents published by Edward Snowden, dated 2012, talk about the use of these services by extremists, so that the intelligence officers established “observation” of 102 such sites. RapidShare, SendSpace and MegaUpload are directly indicated.



MegaUpload closed even earlier, but then he returned in an updated form. RapidShare could not fight such a life.

It is known that as early as February 2014, the leadership of Rapidshare delivered an ultimatum to 23 of 24 employees: leave voluntarily or be fired.

In any case, who else besides extremists and pirates need such sites when there is Dropbox, BitTorrent Sync and many other ways to transfer the file. Not to mention how increased the limits on file attachments in web mail services.