File Hosting Sites Surpass in Traffic the Largest Social Network

Rapidshare and Megaupload together see more traffic than Facebook

In a post earlier this month, P2PON reported about the major increase in popularity of one-click hosting sites such as Rapidshare.com and Megaupload.com and quoted some predictions that say BitTorrent traffic is on its way down (which, however, is not necessarily so – it’s just that P2P grows slower) while the aforementioned services are on the wave.

New figures have been recently published by network management device maker Sandvine that come to prove this massive growth of hosting services. The Sandvine study shows that Rapidshare and Megaupload together account for more global IP traffic that Facebook with its huge database of 300 million users, P2P-Blog reports.

According to the report (called 2009 Global Broadband Phenomena), Facebook is accountable for almost 1.5% of the total global IP traffic while each of the two hosting sites is causing about 1% of global IP traffic. The report further states that the likes of RapidShare have increased their traffic with 56% more in 2009 than last year.

In case you wonder how P2P traffic is doing, Sandivne's research casts some light upon this matter, too – generally, P2P traffic causes around 31.4% of all upstream bandwidth and 15.6% of all downstream bandwidth (the report says that in 2008 P2P accounted for 61.08% of all upstream bandwidth and 22.31% of all downstream bandwidth).

Another aspect to be considered is also the rapid growth of video streaming sites (YouTube causes now about 5% of all global traffic on the Internet!) and you can go check another P2PON post about the issue here.