Rapidshare To Shut Down on March 31 This Year

The Switzerland-based file sharing, online storage and cloud backup portal, RapidShare, will shut down on March 31 this year. The company made the announcement with a notice on its website.

"We strongly recommend all customers to secure their data," Rapidshare says in a message on its website. "After March 31st, 2015 all accounts will no longer be accessible and will be deleted automatically."

While the Standard Plus subscription charges users EUR 50 (roughly Rs. 500) per month for 300GB of storage space, the Premium subscription charges EUR 100 (roughly Rs. 1000) per month for 700GB of space. This however, is more costly than most of the other cloud storage services in the market like Dropbox, OneDrive, Box and Google Drive.

RapidShare started its service in 2002 and gained significant amount of traction year-on-year. As mentioned by TechCrunch, RapidShare's then rival, Megaupload was shut down by early 2012, in the wake of which RapidShare tried to rebrand itself as a cloud storage service and introduced some new anti-piracy policies.

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N4GM notes that while Rapidshare used to be a dominant player in the file-sharing space, it's fallen on hard times ever since it adopted additional anti-piracy measures that hurt its traffic. In particular, Rapidshare seems to have been particularly damaged after it implemented a data download limit of 1 gigabyte per day for non-paying users in an effort to ward off piracy.