Rapidshare is a website hosted German and Switzerland, offering a hosting service files in one click. Offering Rapidshare includes two versions: a free but limited version (free) version but full pay (premium), whose revenues fund the service. The millions of files stored on its servers rank this site among the most important platforms of this type. According to Alexa, Rapidshare.com is the 12th website over the world visited the three months April to June 2008.

Rapidshare has two separate websites, both claiming to be two completely separate entities. The original site is using the domain Rapidshare.de national top level reserved for the Federal Republic of Germany. De. The other appeared more recently, use for its field. Com.

On October 20, 2006, the homepage Rapidshare announced that "unfortunately, all hard drives are full Rapidshare.de. A new website, Rapidshare.com was then developed with aims to take the place of Rapidshare.de in the near future. In April 2007, launching Rapidshare.com, account holders pay on Rapidshare.de could also use them on Rapidshare.com, the converse is however not possible.

These sites allow all users to store files on their servers (100 MB from the site and Rapidshare.com 2GB through the use of their dedicated application RapidShare Manager, up to 300 MB on Rapidshare.de) l user receives after the transfer operation a unique download URL which enables anyone with to download the file posted. In principle the only way to access files hosted, it is not possible to perform file searches directly on the server. Now you can find free rapidshare movies on that site.Rapidshare films are the most popular on the web.However, various methods exist to circumvent this limitation, including the use of the Google search engine limited to the extension sought and the site rapidshare.com or. Of, various sites posing as specialized search engines for site Rapidshare (and sometimes other hosting sites) have also emerged.

According Rapidshare, their host servers to date 4.5 petabytes and operate at a speed of 230 Gigabits per second.

Users of the free service must wait in order to download (usually 2 or 3 minutes).

The registration fee has many advantages, such as the possibility of multiple simultaneous downloads or interrupt and restart quickly and easily transfers. Paid accounts are limited to a maximum over a rolling 5 days in order to curb the sharing of accounts, particularly through the use of dedicated websites. Once 20 GB, however, this limitation is regularly increased (25 GB from February 9, 2007 and 50GB from June 3, 2008).