I was scrolling through comments on the multihoster list page and saw some comments that brought up a question that I thought deserved a post of its own. Specifically, why do multihoster / debrid / leech / link-generator services limit downloads on some hosters. I’ve seen this on other sites as well, people who don’t understand what multihoster services are, how they work, or what really should be expected of them.
Premium account limits for filehosting sites
Most popular premium filehosting sites have built-in daily limits for members. Some of them advertise it plainly, like Keep2Share, others have it hidden in small print, tucked away in their Terms of Service, and I expect that many services just don’t give you an exact number, rather they obscure their daily limit within an ambiguous “fair use” clause.
I’ll use LinkSnappy as an example as I have screenshots and I use them personally, but as a general rule similar services operate this way. Earlier this year both Rapidgator and WDupload were unlimited with a LinkSnappy Elite account for a brief period of time. You can probably still see some of the posts and discussion on their Facebook page as of this writing.
Essentially, back around May 2019, I believe, LinkSnappy announced that Rapidgator moved to unlimited with an Elite account:
In mid-July announced that they were removing their 75GB global daily limit, allowing unlimited downloads daily outside of any filehosters with daily limits. Toward the end of July they were having trouble keeping Rapidgator working and announced they’d moved to a 30GB daily limit for Rapidgator downloads. Probably not coincidentally, I believe that’s around the daily limit for a Rapidgator premium account directly: I couldn’t find info on the site, but found some references to 30GB/day and 33GB/day with a Rapidgator premium account.
In August 2019 LinkSnappy announced that WDupload was unlimited. By September 1st, they lowered the daily limit to match WDupload.com’s own premium account, which they stated is 34GB. I can’t find info on WDupload daily download limits on their site, I assume things are as LinkSnappy posted.
So, one of the reasons why multihoster services have daily limits in place is because many or most premium account filehosters, especially the more popular ones, have daily limits themselves. Even if information about these limits isn’t publicly available.
Costs due to losses of premium accounts
Absent some kind of agreement between a multihoster and premium account filehoster, these companies are at odds with one-another. Multihosters / debrid services / premium link generators work by purchasing premium accounts from whichever filehosting sites they want to support. Most or all premium filehosting sites forbid any type of account sharing. This is exactly what multihoster services do — they share premium accounts with multiple different people and charge for that shared access. If a filehosting service discovers unauthorized usage, in most cases, as per the Terms of Service I’ve read on multiple sites, they terminate the offending account without refund.
Though this is conjecture on my part, I’m guessing this is why some of these filehosting sites have such low daily limits. It’s because it’s exorbitantly expensive to support them, in part, due to lost premium accounts owned by the multihoster service. For example, if you’re a multihoster service trying to support a new filehosting site, you’re not likely going to just write a script and start offering flawless downloads. There’s trial and error. And a loss of usable IP addresses, I’d assume. Then, you have to continually tweak your setup as your accounts get banned, deal with filehosters making changes and work that out so that the losses are acceptable.
Multihoster vs premium filehosters – two distinct roles
Despite how attractive multihoster services can be compared to buying multiple premium filehoster accounts, they serve two different purposes. If you want to download a lot of files reliably from Rapidgator, for example, you probably should get a Rapidgator premium account. On the other hand, if you want to download from Rapidgator, but could also use Uploaded.net, Turbobit, Filefactory or others, in that case it can be advantageous to use a service like LinkSnappy or any other tested multihost service. I love multihoster services, especially those that include a torrent downloader, but I’ve purchased premium accounts in the past, after using multihosters for years, when I needed to download a lot of files from a specific filehoster.
Daily limits help keep good services running
I’m not a fan of low daily download limits. I think less than 5GB of daily downloads for any service is too low, even though I can understand the reasoning for it. However, with a good link-generator / premium account leech service, in the long run, it can be worth it. I can’t remember seeing it with other services, but I’ve noticed daily download limits with LinkSnappy increase several times over the years for several sites. I’m sure there are others out there which I hope to identify someday. These low daily limits, while annoying and possibly useless for some people, actually can work to improve stability for all users. Good services, once they’ve worked out the kinks in their setup, may be able to increase limits over time and overall improve stability for certain filehosters that may have started out with low daily limits.
These are a couple of the reasons why multihoster services have limits on certain filehosting sites. Essentially, to not allow their users to use more than a direct premium account themselves at a shared rate and to minimize losses while hopefully working to improve support for these low-limit filehosters.
Disclaimer
I do not have much in the way of ‘insider info’ on multihoster services. I’ve read about them, used them for 8 years now personally, have spoken off and on with administration for some of these services, formerly a programmer, currently an internet technician and have operated websites and servers for almost 18 years. So, I am not an industry expert, just have a fair bit more insight than the average user.
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