It appears that this question has been asked often enough both in the shoutbox and through contact, so we decided to make an official statement about why we do it and how it affects you...

Click on that "Read more" link to get see the complete picture...

In July, Rapidshare raised their upload/download for free users to 200MB per file. We at RSLinks.org noticed it and began discussing whether to change and post 200MB parts instead. After a prolonged discussion and a vote, it was decided not to raise the bar, but allow some flexibility. We decided that any single upload over 2GB (a 720p movie, a game release, etc) may use 200MB/part archival process. For anything less than that, the bar will stay at 100MB per file maximum. So why did we decide to do that?

1. Keeping up with the tradition - ever since this site was created over a year and a half ago we stuck by 100MB limit, it withstood the test of time, we and the visitors are used to it. Good old RapidUploader is very easy to use and we are all creatures of habit.

2. Premium users will still download the same amount - dividing a large file into fewer parts won't reduce the overall download volume so whether you download 3 or 4 files it will not make a difference as far as your traffic balance is concerned.

3. You won't get the files faster - depending on your download manager and your Internet connection, it would actually be beneficial to download 4 parts at once than 3. You may be able to download 4 files simultaneously at 1MB/s each, but if you switch to 3 connections then there is no guarantee that the download speed will go up to 1.33MB/s (4 * 1 / 3 = 1.33). In fact, if not all the files that you're downloading are equal, for example when you're downloading 2 sets of links, then the quicker the smallest file (usually either part 4 or part 2 for TV shows) finishes the sooner the next download can begin.

4. We need points too - to keep our accounts alive we need points, to create new ones because the other ones are full we need points, to be able to offer premium accounts in competitions here we need points, to top up our traffic allowance so we can bring you more content here we need points. As you can see, points are important. We get a very limited amount of points from premium downloaders (maximum of 255 per day to exact) so we have to try to get the rest from the free users.

5. Could have been worse - you may or may not know, but Rapidshare actually has an upload limit of 2GB per file for premium users. However, there is a problem: only premium customers are able to upload and download such files. So, potentially, we can upload a 1CD movie just as one big file but we won't because we know that only premium users will be able to benefit from that.

6. Rapidshare is prone to changing its mind - there has been a time in the past when Rapidshare increased the upload limit but, after a while, brought it back down to what it was and disallowed access to larger than 100MB files which were upped during that period. We do not want that to happen because that would be a waste of our efforts.

7. Good for redownloading - having smaller parts is good if you have an archive that is corrupted. Redownloading is one way to attempt to solve it and downloading just 100MB instead of twice that amount is good to keep your traffic balance as high as possible.

So, for our most popular content (movies and TV series), we have preserved the system that we had in place so neither premium nor free users have lost anything they had before. Additionally, if a free user will want to download large volumes (games and HD movies) then it's possible that he/she will get 200MB files which means he/she will get their files sooner.

We hope that you understand why we kept things the way we had. It is not easy to keep them balanced for free users, those who are enjoying the benefits of a premium account and ourselves.

In the future, we may review the situation and introduce 200MB per file as a standard, but doing so right now is not 100% beneficial to all parties involved.