Zippyshare Closing
Since 2006 we have been on the market in an unchanged form, that is, as ad financed/free file hosting. However, you have been visiting in less and less over the years, as the arguably very simple formula of the services we offer is slowly running out of steam.
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All sorts of adblockers, whether built into the browser, as add-ons, or in the form of DNS services. Sure, we all use them, but they take away any control the site owner has over the site. Eventually we get to the point where a vicious cycle begins, in order to pay for the server infrastructure you are forced to place more and more ads, then users fire up more and more adblockers and we get to a point like today.
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Over the past year, electricity prices have gone up 2.5 times, which, with a large number of servers, gives a significant increase in costs that we have no way to balance.
Via Andy Maxwell (Hacker News):
Zippyshare’s success was built on solid yet basic foundations; straightforward free hosting of files, via a clean interface, at zero cost to the user.
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Almost three years after the surprise 100mb limit was introduced, Zippyshare doubled its filesize limit to 200mb. A little later, when the internet was consumed with Megaupload being taken down, Zippyshare carried on as if nothing had happened, or it did once its email servers had been fixed.
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Nominated for “notorious market” status by the RIAA in 2013, Zippyshare became a magnet for rightsholder complaints, regular referrals to the U.S. government, and millions of DMCA notices.
To date, rightsholders have requested the removal of more than 14.5 million Zippyshare URLs but for internet users in Europe, worse was on the horizon.
I used to send files by way of zippy, no fuss password protected obviously small stuff I wanted to send over - but it became really NSFW and I had to change to another.
Of course it also means people aren’t using it to share files to people who may have children in the same room - it really was over the top stuff[…]
Previously:
All of these services have been historically used by, among others, plenty of old-school music blogs. There are many reasons to object to file sharing, but I do think there is something special about that era of online publishing.
Ernesto Van der Sar (via Hacker News):
RARBG, one of the world’s largest torrent sites, has said “farewell” to millions of users.
