Rapidshare, a Swiss cloud storage provider, once was the most popular file-hosting service in the Internet and today it has announced their shutdown date which is March 31st, 2015. It is said in Rapidshare’s home page:
“We strongly recommend all customers to secure their data. After March 31st, 2015 all accounts will no longer be accessible and will be deleted automatically.”
In the past 2 years Rapidshare has been under continued pressure to take additional anti-piracy measures which it finally did. So, RapidShare tried another strategy and launched a revamped website with much stronger anti-piracy measures and new pricing options . This new strategy didn’t really work and have had a huge decrease in its traffic and global rank. Rapidshare’s Alexa rank is 5006, which is awful for a website that once was the most visited website for hosting and sharing files.
In the past, Rapidshare was mostly used for sharing copyright materials and that got the company into trouble on various occasions. Unlike other file-hosting companies such as Megaupload, Hotfile and etc, Rapidshare could survive lawsuits and was found legal by a German court. But the additional anti-piracy measures led to losing users and traffic.
The main reason for this unexpected shutdown is not clear yet, but losing that much traffic in 2 years looks enough for a shutdown.