In the continuing saga of Kim Dotcom against the forces of blind, silly, and technically illiterate conservatism, amongst whom John Key (our Minister of International Embarrassment) fits pretty well. Kim Dotcom has launched a new file storage service. Although that is not strictly correct – rather people associated with him did1.
It is the “Mega” and is accessible at present only using the https://mega.co.nz. It launched exactly a year after those embarrassing scenes as police raided Dotcom’s house in response to a legally dubious request from the US.
The site runs on HTML5 and offers a good example of the type of nice, clean, simple and fast1 interface that should be the norm for HTML5 (but I’ll bet that we won’t see many as clean as this design).
It has been interesting watching the traffic load up today. That probably has something to do with the 50GB of encrypted cloud storage given away free when you sign up. The system has been rather overloaded today, as Chris Keall points out at the NBR.
Kim Dotcom’s colleague and co-accused Finn Batato told NBR ONLINE shortly before 11am, “We are literally overwhelmed by the popularity of the new Mega. Our tech team is sorting everything out. No major issues, just the usual challenges when you launch a big service like ours. Currently approximately 1200 users are signing up per minute. It is a huge load.”
Who knew the FBI has so many agents?
Indeed… The service is pretty popular today.
This morning I was able to queue files to go up and they moved pretty fast given the limits on a ADSL uplink. This evening files just sit waiting to depart.
The problem with a web interface is that once queued you can’t shut the webpage. In time I’d guess that we will see a better balancing. Even more importantly, we’ll probably see a API similar to that on dropbox and other services to allow this type of work to be done by services and batch scripts.
Chris has also pointed out the explanation about why the services haven’t been hosted inside NZ. Which is also the reason that this site is no longer hosted inside NZ – the bandwidth prices are too variable and frigging expensive…
But the cost of bandwidth on the Southern Cross Cable prohibited a local hosting deal.
Dotcom says a Southern Cross wholesaler wanted to charge him $28 per megabit of capacity a month, or 30 times what he was quoted for international connectivity in various overseas locations. He was also irked that various ISPs approached for quotes wanted to charge $2 per megabit of capacity a month for domestic traffic. In Europe, peering (network interconnection) agreements meant there were no domestic bandwith charges, Dotcom said. Cogent is supplying at least 10 gigabit capacity for an undisclosed price – although it apparently still wasn’t enough. Around 8.30am this morning Mega.co.nz was not loading. On Twitter Kim said the site was overloaded due to “massive demand.”
Pacific Fibre alumnus Lance Wiggs told NBR those prices sounded broadly (although he is not closest to the market now”. The best deals are gained by dealing with Southern Cross directly, but only one or two local customers have the scale to deal with the cable operator directly (Dotcom went through a wholesaler). ” It’s not acceptable for any NZ business,” Wiggs says.
What I was primarily interested in were the prices of the paid service.
Pro I ~= $16 NZ per month
Pro II ~= $32 NZ
Pro III ~= $48 NZ
Ummm.. I could do with some storage. That Pro III won’t fit the whole of my workstation, but it would take all of the volatile stuff. It is a pity that my local ISP limits me to a mere 200Gb per month and it really does trickle it on the uplink. Having had to shunt a few digital copies of my partners film to festivals world wide, I can testify to how slow it is….
Ideally I’d shift to fibre. However it appears that the moron ministers (like Steven Joyce) in this government rolled out fibre to the home without considering how to get it into multi-occupancy buildings like apartment blocks.
But that is life in this country run by a technically illiterate government..
1. Chris Keall3 has a interesting breakdown of the ownership.
2. At least it was on my Kubuntu 13.04 workstation and Ubuntu 12.04 laptop both running the recent Chrome browsers. I couldn’t be bothered firing up windows to find out that it has problems on Internet Explorer. Lets just take that a given… 😈
3. Is there anyone else apart from Chris writing on this in NZ or even overseas? Most of what shows on the net appears to be repeats of what he is saying 🙂
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