Rapidshare became in little time the world champion of the services of “filehosters”. The site of the small company of Zug is the 16th most popular site in the internet.

However the success also has its negative side: Rapidshare more and more is accused of promoting the piracy.

The site is simple, without texts, images or banners it reminds a little a search motor. However, the form is not to search for a word, but to search data in the own computer. Few users would say that it brings so much sobriety, it hides an universe of more than 50 million digital files. And they are available to anybody. It is only necessary to find the addresses.

Obviously their proprietors didn’t have intention of motivating the piracy, but the side effect is recognized. In the statistics, the address web of the company is in the 16th position of the sites more visited in the world – just below giants like Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook or Wikipedia – according to the analysis portal Alexa.

The ranking shows that Rapidshare became the filehoster world champion. Impressive it is also the technique that is behind all of that: its servers have the capacity to store 10 Petabytes now (10.4 million Gbytes). More than 15 million users access the site daily.

What few Internet users knows is that Rapidshare is a Swiss company. It is located in the fifth floor of a commercial building, fence of workshops, small industries and other anonymous offices, in the industrial area of Cham, a small village in the canton of Zug.

What does explain the success of Rapidshare? The answer is in a model that bets in the simplicity of handling of the system. For the free use, anybody that has a computer and access to the internet can make the uploading of a 200 MB file.

Limit doesn’t exist for number of files put in the located servers in Germany. Each file receives a link, that can be distributed friends or customers then or even published at some forum on the internet. If nobody download them in 90 days, they are deleted.

Via: Swiss Info.