Man, Rapidshare sure likes to annoy their paying customers. First there was that trouble of the daily limits being lowered over the summer while they did upgrades. Now they're really shooting themselves in the foot.
Up until today, Rapidshare Premium accounts (the ones people pay for) had a 10 gigabyte a day limit. Now, Rapidshare is switching from 10 gigs a day to an 80 gig a month limit (roughly 2.6 gigs per 30 days) and charging the same price they were before.
Up until today, Rapidshare Premium accounts (the ones people pay for) had a 10 gigabyte a day limit. Now, Rapidshare is switching from 10 gigs a day to an 80 gig a month limit (roughly 2.6 gigs per 30 days) and charging the same price they were before.
Existing accounts keep the 10 gig a day limit until the next time they have to renew, at which point the new pricing/gig limit kicks in. (Or until Rapidshare decides to stick it to people who renewed their accounts before they thought up this crappy new pricing scheme.) My premium account is up for renewal on November 5th. I had been planning on re-upping, but now I don't think I'm going to bother.
I dropped usenet because I simply couldn't shell out $15 a month for that anymore. 3 months of Rapidshare is 16.99 in Euros, which with the current exchange rate is about 21.75. That's the plan I've been using, since the beginning of the year, and just renewing every few months. It's 29.99 in Euros (roughly $38.40 USD at the current exchange rate) for Rapidshare for six months versus about $85 for six months of usenet access. So, up until this change I had been able to get service comparable to usenet at a highly reduced rate through Rapidshare. (At one point, I had been using both.)
I hate to switch to torrents to get my foreign shows (I really don't need the BBC trying to sue me), but usenet isn't cost effective for me given my current economic situation. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
I dropped usenet because I simply couldn't shell out $15 a month for that anymore. 3 months of Rapidshare is 16.99 in Euros, which with the current exchange rate is about 21.75. That's the plan I've been using, since the beginning of the year, and just renewing every few months. It's 29.99 in Euros (roughly $38.40 USD at the current exchange rate) for Rapidshare for six months versus about $85 for six months of usenet access. So, up until this change I had been able to get service comparable to usenet at a highly reduced rate through Rapidshare. (At one point, I had been using both.)
I hate to switch to torrents to get my foreign shows (I really don't need the BBC trying to sue me), but usenet isn't cost effective for me given my current economic situation. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
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I'm still trying to figure out if I'd use 80 gb a month.
I know my usage varies, and I don't even know if I hit anywhere near 80 gigs a month on RS. I just object to the idea of paying the same amount of money to get less service than when I signed up.
According to the logs in my Premium Zone dashboard I used a total of 49936128 KB between September 24th and October 24th. So that's roughly 48 gigabytes. Now, that's a month where I spent less time on the internet than normal (for obvious reasons). I'm not sure how skewed those numbers are in either direction since I did go back and download all of the US TV shows that I didn't watch over the course of about a week to a week and a half.
Like I said though, my usage varies. Sometimes there's tons of good stuff airing overseas, and other times where there's nothing on over there worth downloading. (Not to mention varying amounts of pr0n posted on RS each month.)
Yeah, I totally see your issue.
Are they removing the daily cap? If so, that'd be nice for those heavy flow days. [/tampon commercial]
It's incredibly unclear if they're removing the daily cap or not.
Rapidshare seems to be juggling how to provide service yet still make a profit. I noticed a new thing on my dashboard: Traffic left: 10 000 MB (+55 GB).
As true to your post I will keep my 10 GB a day until I renew hence my dashboard stating: "You are going to continue to be credited with 10 GB download traffic per day, until 26.06.2009. It is 244 days remaining."
Your 244 days remaining certainly beats my 11 days remaining.
I just read that they also changed the uploads. You can't just upload a file and spread it around, now it has to be uploaded by a collector or a premium user, otherwise it only gets 10 and that's it.
Yeah, I neglected to mention that since in all the time I've had Rapidshare, I've only uploaded three files.
So, basically, if you find an RS link on a forum or someplace like 4chan, you have to hope that the uploader is somebody with a premium account or the link will probably be dead by the time you hit it.
It's starting to sound like rapidshare's reign over file hosting is coming to an end.
That cartoon in your post is AWESOME! It is now my new work desktop wallpaper :)
There is no reason to fear the torrents, the torrents are your friend, embrace them.
The image in the post is posted to 4chan pretty often.
Torrents are awesome. Awesome if you want much slower download speeds and want to increase the likelihood of get sued. (I never hear about anybody on Rapidshare or usenet getting sued.) It's just too easy to get your IP address from a torrent. Peer Guardian is a joke.
Plus there's the whole uploading as well as downloading thing that Torrent is based on. It eats up more bandwidth than downloading alone. That's a big concern for me now that Comcast has that new bandwidth cap, since I use them.
So, for me at least, Torrents are the last "friend" I turn to when I want to download something that's "grey area".
I hope I didn't sound like a dick in that last post. Re-reading it, I might've come across that way, which isn't what I wanted to do at all. I'm just saying that I have a lot of reasons why I consider Bit Torrent as a personal last resort for my downloading needs.
Apart from the whole uploading bandwidth cap thing, which I would see as a legitimate concern(or a legitimate reason to switch ISPs),it sounds like you just have some bad experiences with public trackers and eat too much into the legal propaganda. The chance of being sued using a torrent is very small, sure it is heard of unlike usenet, but it happens so infrequently it's barely a concern. Plus most of the people who get those C&D letters are either leeching piratebay torrents of very popular movies, or fake torrents of very popular movies set up by the MPAA. If you move to a private tracker this problem all but goes away. If you want I can get you an invite to one that will max your download speed guaranteed
Well, yeah, if there were a comparable option to Comcast, like Verizon's FiOS in my area, I would absolutely leave over the bandwidth cap thing. But at the moment there isn't. The closest thing is DSL at half the speed, and that's not really an option since when I did have DSL the line kept cutting out and dropping me.
As far as "legal propaganda" goes, I know the whole procedure is your ISP gets a letter about your IP address first. Thing is, I'm on Comcast, and they'll either shut you off or roll over and rat you out to the RIAA/MPAA/whoever at their say so. I prefer to minimize my risks. I simply don't have the resources to fight back legally if the BBC decides to make an example out of me because I want to watch new episodes of DOCTOR WHO a few months before they air here in the US.
I'm on two (very) private trackers already. I've been a member of both since day one. But I hardly ever download anything from them. I hit one of them daily just to read the forums though, lots of good stuff to read. Another thing is that most private trackers require you to have and maintain a high ratio. I simply don't want to deal with any of that.
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