Rapidshare has disabled resumable downloads & has set a limit for its free users!

As when MegaUpload faced loss many of other file lockers too have suddenly been barraged by invasion of uploaders and downloaders searching for an alternate site to exchange content. This situation gets even more worse when some more big names shutdown completely in fear of being the next target.

As you must have be a user of Rapidshare and you may know that it offers one click downloads for some time now, letting users to download at fast speeds image any kind of image verification. Whereas the free users were limited to typical things like one download at single time along with occasional

They have put a squeeze on the free users limiting their download speed to 30 Kbps and moreover disabling the ability to resume downloads. Furthermore they have implemented a different strategy to limiting speeds. Instead of throttling the actual transfer speed to 30 Kbps they allow you to download at pretty higher speeds but then suddenly “PAUSE” the download and looks like the download has been frozen. The pauses add time to the overall download and make the average of the data transferred over the time period equal to about 30 Kbps.

May be this is the technique to get users to shift over to the Premium ship, and what about the users who only use the service for single download? Also with their peculiar way of limiting speeds, is this going to let users think that the service is unreliable? Moreover downloading huge files at 30 Kbps is offensively slow and would simply frusta users after a short time. Is this the way by which they think users will join their Premium service or will the users herd to an alternative file locker?