Type of site One-click hosting Website ex.ua Commercial Yes | Revenue $3 000 000 (2013) Alexa rank 15 (UA) | |
Available in Russian
Ukrainian
English
Spanish
French
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Polish
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Kazakh | ||
Ex.ua is a one-click hosting service that offers both free and commercial services. Operating from Ukraine, it is financed by advertisements on the website. Ex.ua is said to be the largest file-sharing service in Ukraine and allows uploads of up to 50 GB. The site's traffic accounted for 15–25% of domestic traffic.
Contents
In a 2010 letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the RIAA described the site as one of the top pirate sites online.
History
Service was founded in the summer of 2009, after the closure of the Ministry of Interior of similar resources infostore.org.
In November 2010, the Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA) made ex.ua in the list of 25 sites that contribute to the spread of illegal music. The association claimed that the site was not a single video or song, the legality of which is confirmed by the spread of the copyright owner. After these events, the representative ex.ua Piskovyi Yuri said that the service can make free of charge, to deduct a percentage content creators and avoid accusations of copyright infringement.
December 16, 2010 the site was temporarily unavailable due to technical reasons. Some electronic media reported that the service was closed for the distribution of unlicensed products. A day later the site worked again, but only became available for Ukrainian users.
2012 Raid
On January 31, 2012, the office of Ex.ua was raided and 200 servers containing 6 petabytes of data were confiscated and 16 employees questioned. The blocking of ex.ua domain name by the Imena.ua registrar led to multiple DDoS attacks on Ukrainian government websites. Outraged general users also took part in the attacks, mainly using LOIC. The calls to join the attacks were spread through various forums. On February 3, 2012, Ex.ua was returned as the domain could not be seized for the alleged copyright infringements, and began restoring service.