Last November, RapidShare limited the amount of public traffic per user account to just 1GB per day to tackle its piracy problem. Despite this restriction, users were able to store an unlimited amount of data on their account and also given unlimited download speed. So despite RapidShare tackling the piracy issue, the service remained particularly popular with users who didn’t share their data as they could backup as much personal data as they like for free.
However, RapidShare recently made a rather surprise announcement that will affect free account holders, particularly those who archived a lot of data to the cloud service. From Wednesday, 20th March, there will be a 5GB storage limit applied to free account holders and those with over 5GB in their account must download everything they wish to keep before April 3rd, as all data over the 5GB limit will be mass-deleted on that date.
While the 2 week deadline may seem very close, another problem free users face is a 5GB daily download limit of personal data according to TorrentFreak, which means users with a large amount of data that they wish to keep are forced to pay for a premium account before the deadline to download their data. It's unclear if this is a temporary limit, as RapidShare's own product page specifies a much smaller 1GB daily download limit for personal data for free accounts.
RapidShare's new business model will be €9.99/month or €99.99/year for 250GB of storage and double these prices for 500GB of storage. When RapidShare announced its new model on March 12th, free users were originally given to just March 20th to pay up, but this deadline has been extended to the 3rd of April. Existing paying members will also move over to this new model and those unhappy with the changes can cancel their subscription subject to a €15 admin fee to process refunds.
