RapidShare. Completely unusable?

26 . December 2009
written by Clemens Lang at Dec 26th 2009, 1:59
A friend of mine wanted to share a video he made prior to publishing it at some video portal. He uploaded it to RapidShare. And that's where the problems started…

RapidShare is changing it’s free download limits (as in speed, time and size) like others are changing their underwear. Their current setup however, is the worst I’ve experienced so far and makes RapidShare almost completely unusable without a client software.
I had to reload about 20 times and wait around 15 minutes, before I even got a download ticket. I had to wait 90 seconds after I got the ticket for the download to finally start. For each reload I had to click twice, after I got the ticket it took another click to start the download. In total, that sums up to 20 * 2 + 1 = 41 clicks on a website that advertises itself as “1-CLICK Web hosting - Easy Filehosting”.
The download itself took 43 minutes 25 seconds for a total of 114.83 MiB, that’s about 45.14 KiB per second. Compare that to a test download I did from a full-speed server that delivered 657.37 KiB/s for a 30.6 MiB file in 48 seconds. That’s more than 1400% as fast as a download from RapidShare, not counting the waiting time.

The numbers speak for themselves – in my opinion RapidShare is completely unusable at the moment (and even more for less tech-savvy people than for me).