iFolder.ru

» see ifolder.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

iFolder.ru never reached me in Turkey and it was not built to. The interface was Russian, with a Rambler Top100 counter in the footer. When an affiliate program came along years later, it paid in rubles. The service belonged to Agava, a Russian hosting company, and it worked like every one-click host of its decade: upload a file and pass the link around. Downloading was free if you sat through advertising, and there was a paid tier for people who would not.

A Rusfolder representative wrote in 2015 that "we began operating in 2006", and the archive agrees. In November 2006 ifolder.ru still pointed at a test server named master.ifolder.agava.ru. By June 2007 the upload form was live with a limit of 100 MB per file. Registration was optional. Signing up added a file manager and took the expiry date off your files.

By early 2010, according to Russian Wikipedia, about 30,000 files arrived every day and the service ran on more than 70 servers in a Golden Telecom data center. An Agava representative put advertising revenue at around 200,000 rubles a day. Press reports from March of that year counted roughly 1.5 million registered users.

~ the case file ~

~ three days in march ~

On 17 March 2010 investigators from the Moscow police arrived at the data center over a child pornography case tied to a file on iFolder. Agava offered to locate the file and help identify the uploader. The officers wanted to take the hardware away for their own examination. After negotiation the servers stayed in the building, but the police switched them off and sealed them. Agava's primary DNS servers lost power in the same sweep.

The shutdown of a host with a million and a half users became national news. On 19 March the interior minister, Rashid Nurgaliyev, ordered a review of whether the operation had been lawful, acting on an instruction from President Dmitry Medvedev. iFolder was back in full on 20 March. It returned with the upload limit raised from 100 MB to 500 MB and most of its advertising temporarily gone. Agava's PR director, Nadezhda Frank, told reporters that tracking every uploaded file was "practically impossible".

~ a new name on the same page ~

Between 25 May and 5 July 2012 ifolder.ru began redirecting to rusfolder.com. Nothing else moved. The layout and the feature list were identical, with a new word in the title bar, and no explanation is archived on the homepage. In March 2015 an account named RF opened a thread on the Searchengines.guru webmaster forum. It called Rusfolder "the largest file host on the Runet" and said it was "previously known as ifolder.ru". The offer was 300 rubles per thousand unique downloads from Russia. The replies under it complain about 503 errors and an administration that did not answer.

~ please take your files ~

The capture of 16 December 2016 shows a normal homepage offering 1 GB per file and unlimited storage. The next one, from 21 January 2017, has a notice above the menu: "Attention! Dear users! We inform you that from 23 January the RusFolder.com project is closing. Please take the files you need." That was the whole announcement. A later answer on Mail.ru's Q&A site claims users were warned a month ahead, which the two captures neither prove nor rule out.

By 2 March 2017 rusfolder.com was serving a business directory that claimed 1,198,129 organizations in 94 cities. Today ifolder.ru redirects to a consumer reviews site.

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