I love RapidShare.de. RapidShare is a free file hosting service. Anyone can simply head over to the site, use the upload feature to quickly upload any file to their servers and in return you will be given a special URL for the uploaded file. One can use the URL to distribute/share/save any sort of files. Rapidshare takes off the bandwidth burden from having to host a file on one's own server. It is awesome for use as sharing large files between friends while on MSN Messenger - which so far is a pain-in-the-butt especially when there are firewalls on either side forcing Messenger to use data proxying via their servers.

There are also entire communities devoted to sharing files over online file sharing services and RapidShare stands tall among them all. There are gigabytes of ebooks, videos, applications, photos and songs on RapidShare - all one has to do is to find it. A simple search on Google for RapidShare'd linked will turn up a lot of hits but more effective is locating a place where the stuff you are looking for are posted. Ofcourse, the question whether the shared/posted content is illegal or not boils down to the fact that uploading/downloading copyrighted, commercial material is covered under the same rules and regulations as that done on Peer-to-Peer services like KaZaa, LimeWire and the lot.

I had been using the free service for quite sometime. I even used it to share that Maldivian tourism promotion song here on my blog. If you are a serious downloader, then the premium (paid) service is well worth it - it has no delays, no time restrictions, no speed restrictions and download managers are supported. I've had solid 4000 Kb/s (total on 4 simultaneous streams) download speeds from RapidShare servers - it's not speeds I seem to get from many other servers well except for the almighty Microsoft downloads.

There are other file hosting services too: MegaUpload, MegaShares, UploadGalaxy, ZUpload are a few...

Dump that LimeWire. HTTP downloads rule!