Early last decade a young entrepreneur named Christian Schmid was running forum hosting services and was having difficulty transferring large files. He decided to create his own service for transferring files and RapidShare was born.
The service was originally known as Ezshare but was subsequently changed to RapidShare when Schmid discovered that Kodak owned rights to the former title. The service started small with very few users but is now one of the most known internet services in the world. RapidShare current ranks 88th on the Alexa Traffic List and receives forty million visitors everyday.
When RapidShare went live in the year 2005, it was a one man company. Schmid handled everything, including support and sales.At this time, the web address was RapidShare.de and was aimed mainly at German customers. In the years to follow, RapidShare gained popularity internationally and was eventually changed to RapidShare.com to cater to a wider audience.
War Against Piracy
RapidShare’s spokesman Daniel Raimer says RapidShare is known for file sharing but is actually a file hosting company. Raimer states that they operate in the ‘cloud’ and many business customers use their services to transfer large files from one location to another. RapidShare is concerned about copyright issues and want to keep copyrighted materials off their servers. For that reason, the company employs a seventeen person team dedicated to DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) requests at its Switzerland headquarters. During business hours, the average response time to remove suspected copyrighted material is under an hour. RapidShare currently has sixty employess and are using different data centres in Frankfurt, Germany.The company has a storage space of thirteen PETABYTES (1 Petabyte = 1 Million Gigabytes) and every month, petabytes of data travel through the RapidShare servers. The company has more than 600 gbps bandwidth, which is more than the total bandwidth of many countries.
Privacy Matters
RapidShare hosts a wide array of files, including sensitive business information. Daniel Raimer explains that “privacy is very important and no one can access hosted files.” Also, he assures that they do not use any file monitoring software, offering the best privacy possible. RapidShare uses its own unique, home-built operating system ensuring additional security to its clients. In 2005 there was no competition; there are now several companies in the file hosting game, making things more difficult for RapidShare. Daniel Raimer says they differ from the competition by offering superior customer support and the fastest service. RapidShare wants to remain in file hosting business. Daniel Raimer says they know the business well and will continue to offer robust services to their customers and introduce new technologies, with future plans focusing on mobile tech. RapidShare is a Swiss-owned one-click hosting with paid and free services financed by subscription of paying users.RapidShare is one of the world’s largest file hosting sites with 13 Petabytes of files on its servers, handling up to 3 million users simultaneously.
