RapidShare
RapidShare is a One-click hosting site that operates from Germany and is financed by Google AdSense and by the subscriptions of paying users. It also claims to be the world's largest in its scope.
It is a free service, and any user can upload files of up to 300 MB without registration. The user is then supplied with a unique URL, which locates the file and enables anyone with whom the uploader shares it to download the file. Free downloaders are forced to wait 20 seconds and about 10 seconds more for each 10 MB (however, with files under 500 KB there is no waiting). Registration and payment bring several perks such as download of several files simultaneously, queue-skipping, and the facility to interrupt and re-start download. However, even Premium users have no way to search the server for content (all files have to be downloaded by following a given URL).
Site Promotions
In June 2006, RapidShare started giving away free Premium accounts valid for two days every so often. Free account users are then offered the chance of extending their accounts to 1 month if they gain 10,000 "Premium points", where one point is awarded per download if the downloader is a free-user and your file is bigger than 1 MB and the downloader has generated less than 5 points in the last hour. Those increased measures were introduced to protect Rapidshare from abuse.
Interest in these free accounts is very widespread, and often thousands are registered within several minutes. There even are a few specifically-developed programs that periodically poll the RapidShare site to check if new free Premium accounts are being offered.
Non Premium account downloads usually don't work on conventional download managers. However, a plethora of free software allowing leeching of hosted files are released and updated every few weeks or so, resulting in Rapidshare regularly revamping its protection schemes.
Issues
Users of certain ISPs, such as NTL, are unable to download files off of RapidShare.
Similar Sites
An abundance of storage servers based on the "advertisement plus subscriptions" business model are active as of mid-2006. The following servers, along with RapidShare, are also popular: