RapidShare to Shut Down on March 31

The Switzerland-based file sharing, online storage and cloud backup portal, RapidShare, will shut down on March 31 this year. The company made the announcement with a notice on its website.

RapidShare's website, before showing the login page, now shows a notice stating the shutdown date along with the last date for users to extend the Standard Plus and Premium subscriptions - February 28. "We strongly recommend all customers to secure their data. After March 31st, 2015 all accounts will no longer be accessible and will be deleted automatically," adds the sign.

While the Standard Plus subscription charges users EUR 50 (roughly Rs. 500) per month for 300GB of storage space, the Premium subscription charges EUR 100 (roughly Rs. 1000) per month for 700GB of space. This however, is more costly than most of the other cloud storage services in the market like Dropbox, OneDrive, Box and Google Drive.

RapidShare started its service in 2002 and gained significant amount of traction year-on-year. As mentioned by TechCrunch, RapidShare's then rival, Megaupload was shut down by early 2012, in the wake of which RapidShare tried to rebrand itself as a cloud storage service and introduced some new anti-piracy policies.

However, the rebranding did not seem to work well as early last year RapidShare fired 75 percent of its employees, which was also around the time when it shut down its free service.

With RapidShare shutting down in less than 50 days, other cloud storage services might try to make the most of it by luring the abandoned users. Microsoft last month announced its major Windows 10-based update with new features for its OneDrive cloud storage service. Google too this month introduced a new offer that gives users 2GB of extra storage for free if they perform a Google security check for their accounts.