Files hosted on were no longer available for download. On 1 March 2010, was shut down, and users visiting the site were forwarded to. It operated in parallel with for several years. Schmid avoids the public eye, but took over management of the company after longtime CEO and COO Bobby Chang left in April 2010. In 2004, he started the company RapidShare AG, which went online in August 2004 then moved its premises to Baar, Switzerland in 2006. RapidShare was founded by Christian Schmid in Mulheim, Germany, initially as ezShare later Rapid Share, a file hosting service for his RapidForum web forum hosting services. As of 2017, Rapidshare AG was acquired by Kingsley Global. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidShare ceased to operate and it is defunct. Following the takedown of similar service Megaupload in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously. RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002.

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