14 DAY TRIAL // RapidShare is very skittish about the business it's in. It's trying to distance itself as much as possible from MegaUpload and all the other cyberlockers, but it can't deny its nature completely. That doesn't mean it can't try. The latest move to push away pirates from its service.
It's probably driving away legitimate users and customers too, but that seems to be the path RapidShare chose and it's sticking with it.
Not so long ago, it introduced download limits for users without paid accounts. It recently got rid of the limits, but it is now completely changing how things work.
From now on, users will have a limit on how much they can upload and they have a limit on the traffic they can generate as well.
In practical terms, RapidPro users will get 30GB worth of traffic for free per day. Downloads from them or their contacts don't count towards this new limit, but every other download, from Pro users or not, does.
Users who choose not to pay only get 1GB of free download traffic per day, with the same exceptions. Considering that the only thing cyberlockers are good for is sharing large files, the limits seem and will likely prove paltry.
RapidShare is moving towards a model similar to Dropbox's, with a desktop client and mobile apps.
That may have been a sound move two years ago, but the market is saturated with cloud storage services; Google, Microsoft and Amazon offer a service like this, not to mention countless other smaller companies.
"The new system will be released on 27.11. At the same time we will release the final version of RapidDrive 1.0 for Windows and we will present you with a completely revised website, which will make it even easier for you to manage your files and contacts. So, for saving backups and for daily distribution of big files, RapidShare is the best solution," RapidShare announced.