

RapidShare will delete free users' data over 5GB tonight - sp332
https://rapidshare.com/#help_faq

======
tomku
It's important to remember that the business model of file locker sites like
RapidShare and Mega is to convince you to upload your files to their site so
that they can monetize access to them. Your access as the original uploader is
no exception - if they think they can squeeze a couple dollars/euros/bitcoins
out of you through changes like this, they'll do it. If you don't want your
files to be held hostage, you should probably consider hosting that has a
different business model.

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JohnTHaller
All the free users are screaming about how this destroys RapidShare's
reputation and how they'll never use RapidShare again. Here's the thing,
though. RapidShare used to care about free users when lots of folks were using
it to host illegal files since it would encourage people to pay for faster
downloads. As RapidShare is focused more on legitimate files, they don't care
about these free users since the free users cost RapidShare money. Even if
only 1% were to pay, RapidShare will make far more money off 100,000 paying
users than they will off 10,000,000 free ones.

~~~
StavrosK
Okay, data time:

I created a full-text-search bookmarking app called historious
(<http://historio.us>). It started out as free for everyone, since I just
built it for myself and people found it useful, but I quickly had to charge,
after realizing that people had more than my 10-20 bookmarks (some people had
80 THOUSAND).

I changed it to 2,000 free bookmarks, and unlimited paid, which worked well.
Then I changed it to 300 free, then to 50 free. The reason why I did this is
this:

As per my analytics package, on average, it takes _less than two_ minutes for
95% of my users to upgrade to paid. Basically, from what I can see, users
register, try it out with one or two bookmarks, then upgrade immediately if
they like it. If they don't upgrade then, they are not very likely to ever
upgrade.

Thus, it doesn't make sense for me to support free users (this is very
expensive, since it stores the entire page for everything you bookmark,
twice), so the free tier is more of a "trial" tier now.

I'm not sure how many people who would have upgraded if they'd tried it saw
the limit and said "I won't use this, the free limit is too low", but, based
on the data (and it sounds reasonable to me as well), they are not many.
People reasonably want a short trial run, and then they either upgrade or
don't.

~~~
whyleyc
Thanks for providing an interesting data point. I had a few questions I was
wondering if you might be able to answer ?

1\. How did you deal with existing free users already exceeding your new
limits ? (and how did they react) ? 2\. Did you see a measurable increase in
upgrades after doing this ? 3\. Did you see a measurable decrease in free
users of the service after doing this ?

Thanks.

~~~
StavrosK
1\. I store the limit as a field on each user's profile, so you get to keep
the limit you signed up with (grandfathering). Users don't mind (obviously),
and if I ever increase the limits, I just increase them for everyone. Storage
is expensive, but it's not _that_ expensive that I need to retroactively
reduce old users' limits.

I have also needed to cull unused accounts (of free users who haven't logged
in in months). This provided a great boost to the service (saved me from
needing to keep upgrading the server for the past few months), but it has also
produced a few false positives of people who hadn't used their accounts for a
few months and came back. Luckily, I keep backups they can just restore.

2\. The last limit change was a few days ago, so I haven't had a chance to
gather significant data on this. I guess we'll know in a few months.

3\. I will also track this, that is a good question. I anticipate that a few
users will be deterred from using the service for free, but that might not
necessarily be bad (I am not sure).

~~~
whyleyc
Thanks - and good luck !

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EwanToo
If you're shocked, then you've not been paying the slightest bit of attention.

Don't trust free services for anything important, and don't trust "unlimited"
services, ever!

~~~
rsync
Agreed.

And while this is largely self evident to most people here, if you're looking
for a deeper theoretical underpinning as to why this is the case, feel free to
use this:

[http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-
stora...](http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-storage-
services-vs-rsyncnet.html)

... it seems we have occasion to repost this about once a week these days.

And since we're sharing anecdotes, let me tell you what we just did yesterday:

We sent out an email to every customer we have that is _both_ 500+ days in
arrears with billing _and_ 200+ days idle with usage, and asked them, please,
for the love of god, get in touch with us and let us know whether to close
their account or input an up to date credit card or whatever.

We feel so strongly about our duty to safeguard data for our customers that
even if they haven't paid a dime for 500+ days, and by many measures have
clearly abandoned their account, we still keep them fully live, just in case.

The OP shows us what happens when your business model is a clownshow
(freemium, ad supported, whatever) and our mailing yesterday shows what
happens when you charge real money for real service.

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oellegaard
They should leave existing users data, if they wanted to keep any respect in
the community I'd say. It is sad watching all these companies giving "free"
services away, just to remove them again.

Don't trust anything free, because nothing really is.

~~~
tomku
Paying them yourself isn't enough when it comes to file lockers. Their goal is
to get not only the original uploaders paying to keep their files online, but
also some percentage of downloaders as well. That's why sites like this have
countdown timers, bandwidth limits and waiting periods. They're hoping that
people will get so sick of the bullshit trying to download your files that
they'll spring for a premium subscription.

This is why they've had such an interesting relationship with copyright
infringement. Obviously, they want to avoid getting shut down - but people
uploading TV shows, games, music, movies, etc on places like DDL forums drive
so much traffic and so many premium memberships that their business model
almost depends on them.

Some of them even pay dividends to the popular uploaders, as a thank you for
driving traffic. This drives an entire underground economy, where people
upload copyrighted content to file lockers, then use the payments from the
file locker service to buy more content to upload.

Edit: One example of this kind of underground economy is in the anime
fansubbing community. You've got people who want to widely distribute
200-500mb files (generally) that are... not entirely free of copyright, to say
the least. Hosting the files yourself would be a pain, as you'd get takedown
notices AND have to pay for servers and bandwidth. However, you can upload
your episodes to a couple file locker services and post the links on your
site. You'll get a kickback from the file lockers for driving traffic, and if
they get taken down, you can just reupload them, possibly even at the same
site. The fansub groups say they use the money to pay for hosting and buy Blu-
rays to rip and release, but I'm sure some of them pocket some as a salary
too.

~~~
Retric
Most fansub groups stop when the content owners licence the product in the US
or simply request that they do so. As to making money that's theoretically
possible, but only in the spending all day helping a friend move for a beer is
'making money'.

~~~
tomku
I think your knowledge might be a little outdated. Now that streaming (and
less frequently, retail) rights are being sold before the shows even air,
there's very little mid-season dropping due to licensing - the groups that sub
airing shows know that they're licensed, and they don't care. DVD/BD rip
groups care even less, and they seem to use file lockers a lot more regularly
than the actual fansubbers.

As far as profitability, I don't think that most of them are raking in the
millions, or even doing it as a full-time job. Most of the profit is on the
file locker's side - otherwise they wouldn't be giving payouts in the first
place. I suspect that the groups that really push the DDLs probably make
enough to pay for hosting and some percentage of the DVDs/BDs they buy.
Whether you view that as profit is up to you - but I think it's a little more
than getting a beer for helping a friend move.

~~~
Retric
I have not looked into fan-subs in a few years so you could be right. However,
I have not seen a significant increase in the amount of anime translated so
are you talking about 'rights' or the 'option' to buy said rights. Because, it
seems odd if companies are paying significant amounts of money for
distribution rights just to sit on it.

PS: Though if there is some great streaming service for anime I don't know
about feel free to fill me in on that one.

~~~
tomku
Crunchyroll[1] is the big name in streaming nowadays, and they simulcast a
substantial portion of each season. Funimation licenses for retail, simulcast
and library streaming, and I believe they do their streaming via Hulu. Anime
on Demand is a newer player, and Neon Alley is a PS3-exclusive (for now)
service run by Viz that airs dubs on a schedule like a TV station. Some of the
older players (Sentai Filmworks does a lot of this) will split a license with
Crunchyroll, so one has retail and the other streaming. I'd say that the
English-language market has generally switched to streaming, and that DVDs and
BDs are almost an afterthought now.

Edit: Almost forgot, a bunch of the Japanese studios just announced their own
English-subbed streaming service named Daisuki[2], but it won't launch until
April. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on the foreign
companies.

[1]: <http://www.crunchyroll.com/>

[2]: <http://www.daisuki.net/en/>

------
xtc
I had been a long-time premium user of Rapidshare through it's peak in 2007 to
2009 or so. Their service was wonderful (or so it seemed) until almost nobody
used it anymore. The business model that Rapidshare held on to is clearly
failing them as more and more users are switching to other sites that are
either free or not that expensive (Mega, Mediafire, etc.)

~~~
gwern
Mediafire seems to be hitting the tubes, though. They used to be one of the
best no-nonsense upload service (reliable, instant download, very rare
CAPTCHAs, multiple concurrent downloads, no timeouts), but they've gotten much
more aggressive about deleting files and putting in quite intrusive
advertising-based CAPTCHAs - which broke bulk downloading tools like
jDownloader, as I learned when I went to download a few hundred albums
uploaded from Comiket 83 (I wanted to listen to them but also use them for a
side-project on Touhou music statistics I've been working on).

------
sp332
A link posted earlier by lightning
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397414> has some good information.

 _However, if free users want to “add storage space” – i.e give RapidShare
some money – they can keep their files.

For 9.99 euros for 30 days (or 99.99 euros per year), users can have 250GB of
storage space. The 500GB storage account costs 19.99 euros per 30 days or
199.99 per year.

So what happens when users want to store more than 500GB? TorrentFreak was
told that a user asked RapidShare how much it would cost to host around 2TB of
files and was given a price of 120 euros ($155) per month. For less money
anyone can buy a real-life hard drive, not just once but every single month._

So, it looks like they might also delete data from paying users, with only 24
hours notice.

~~~
dietrichepp
2TB for $155/month? S3 would be $175/month, or $140/month at reduced
redundancy. What a shock that you might pay market rates for online storage
services.

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namenotrequired
I don't understand why people are willing to pay hundreds or a few thousands
on a good computer and then expect everything on the internet to be free. I
think people need to be more prepared to pay for good services. (Not
commenting on the quality of the service in question, I haven't used it in a
long time)

~~~
freehunter
I, for one, shy away from paying for subscription content online because even
some of the best merchants have proven time and time again that they are
unable to properly secure my data. People paid money to Sony. People paid
money to Dropbox. People paid money to LastPass. People paid money to Linode.
And these companies have all let their customers down in security. Why should
I believe RapidShare etc would be any better?

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josteink
And this is why I host my own. Noone else is able to mess with my data.

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alevans4
Am I missing something or did the date change? Looks like this happens on
April 8th, 2013.

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dcc1
Why does anyone use that piece of turd? <http://filecloud.io/> has more
features and hell even has bitcoin option for us geeks

~~~
TheOv3rminD
www.symform.com gives you UNLIMITED cloud storage. The catch? you get a
certain amount free but for more space you have to share your hard drive
space. I use it for data redundancy and it works fuckin great =)

