Have you ever heard of Mediafire or Rapidshare? You may have already used them and downloaded many GBs of stuff. These websites offer something called “one-click file storage”. One-click file hosting is an internet based service that allows users to easily upload whatever they want, except copyrighted materials, from their hard drives or from another similar file hosting provider (called remote upload). This is usually free or very cheap.
These sites have many users utilising their services every day. So I thought it would be a great idea to explain these websites further for people who are curious to learn more. In this article I will explain some of the features of Mediafire and Rapidshare and compare them.
There are a few popular one-click file storage services, the market leader right now is Rapidshare. Rapidshare.com is a German one-click storage website operating from Sweden and financed by paid Premium members. They still offer a free service to non-premium users with some restrictions. A non-premium user cannot upload more than 100Mb of files. The user is then supplied with a URL where the file can be downloaded which allows anyone to download the uploader’s file.
Another popular one-click web hosting site Mediafire started up in 2006 and is located in Texas, USA. The domain Mediafire.com has received plenty of internet user’s attention in a short time because of its rather few limitations for non-premium users compared to similar service providers.
Mediafire vs. Rapidshare
Comparison of Traffic:
According to the Compete.com study, Mediafire gets 1 visitor for each 2 Rapidshare visitors. The figures are misleading though. Lets see how many links there are on the internet for each site.
Link Counts:
All the Mediafire links on the internet:17.900.000
All the Rapidshare links on the internet:140.000.000
According to Google search results Rapidshare has over 140 million incoming links on the internet although Mediafire only has approximately 18 million links. So why – according to Compete.com results – does Mediafire seem much more popular than the Google results suggest? As I mentioned before, Mediafire’s rather few limitations attracted many more downloaders than it would if it has the same restrictions as Rapidshare. Also, Rapidshare encourages their users to share more Rapid links with their point system.
Are you wondering why I searched “Mediafire.com/?”? Because all the download links from Mediafire.com are in the same format which starts with “Mediafire.com/?”. The same is also currently true for Rapidshare links, which start “rapidshare.com/files”. Of course, a forum/blog poster may link to the file with another name, or the same links may have been shared more than once. Also note that Google results are not constant, you might be reading this post a while after I wrote it. Ignore this for now thought because we are just making a comparison.
What is Rapidshare Point System?
Rapidshare started a service called Collector’s Zone. This Zone allows users to gain free membership and some gifts. The more your links are downloaded the more points you will gain. Users are able to gain 1 point for each successful download as long as the file is larger than 1MB and the downloader generated less then 5 points in the last hour. This system though has also caused some unusual uploading habits; Users started to make 100MB files to 120MB just to bump up their link count (from 1 to 2) and to upload files which are already available on the Rapidshare servers. Despite this Rapidshare didn’t give up their promotion system. By contrast Mediafire has no promotion system for their users and this has prevented file uploads from Mediafire fans who always use Mediafire to download their files for free.
Conclusion:
Each service provider has their own upsides and downsides. Mediafire has less restrictions for free users like allowing download accelerators (something which is very rare among similar web hosting providers). Rapidshare use collector’s zone to increase their available link count while focusing their attention improving the experience for Premium users.
Guest article by Akif from Mediafire Search, which offers online search for Mediafire.com links. You can also write a guest article and share valuable insights with our readers.