Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours

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Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday January 20, 2013 @12:56PM from the good-start dept.

Kim Dotcom's new "Mega" cloud service appears to be a hit. According to Dotcom over 1 million have signed up for their free 50 gigabytes of storage. Although that is about 1% of the Dropbox user base, it's not a bad start. From the article: "Mega quickly jumped up to around 100,000 users within an hour or so of the site's official launch. A few hours after that, Mega had ballooned up to approximately a quarter of a million users. Demand was great enough to knock Mega offline for a number of users attempting to either connect up or sign up for new accounts, and Mega's availability remains spotty as of this articles' writing."

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So, correct me if I'm wrong... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-20 13:09 · Score: 0, Insightful

This weird criminal somehow has 50 GB * 1,000,000 = 47.6 petabytes of enterprise storage? Without getting one dollar? How is this paid for? Not to mention all the data traffic back and forth which will be even more expensive?
1. Re:So, correct me if I'm wrong... by seyyah · 2013-01-20 13:31 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  This weird criminal somehow has 50 GB * 1,000,000 = 47.6 petabytes of enterprise storage? Without getting one dollar? How is this paid for? Not to mention all the data traffic back and forth which will be even more expensive?
  1. Not every user is using 50gb.
  2. He has lots of money.
  3. He is investing in a new enterprise and knows that he has to spend money first in order to make money in the future.
  I assumed all that was fairly obvious. What's your theory, by the way?
2. Re:So, correct me if I'm wrong... by knight24k · 2013-01-20 15:04 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  That is called deduplication and most modern SAN systems have this feature. You can have both thin-provisioning and deduplication for increased savings. In Mr. Dotcoms business model I doubt he will get many exact duplicate files, but that really doesn't matter because you can still deduplicate similar binary strings within differing binary files or as you said duplicate blocks. In any case dedupe and thin-prov are not mutually exclusive, you can do both.
  
  Normally dedupe is more efficient for backups or when used on the disk target for a virtual environment since you only need one copy of notepad.exe if you are hosting 200+ windows servers. The same applies to unchanging files in *nix systems. The thing is you *have* to have some way to "present" the 50GB of promised space. While you may use dedupe or any other method to reduce your storage footprint the end user wants to see that storage. You either have to present that space raw, which comitts it from the SAN or as a thin-provisioned LUN with only the bare minimum of space actually reserved. How you store those files after the fact is up to you as the hosting company, but if you promise 50GB of space the user will want to see that space available.
3. Re:So, correct me if I'm wrong... by MartinSchou · 2013-01-20 17:53 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  You don't even NEED a lot of money to get 50 PB of storage.
  Granted, you need some, but it's a lot less than people think.
  18 months ago, BackBlaze showed how to build a 135 TB server for $7,384, and the price would be just about the same today.
  That's $56,696/TB for a total of $2,834,800
  For what Kim has in mind for Mega, 3 million in storage hardware isn't exactly surprising. In fact I'd be surprised if they haven't budgeted for a lot more than that.
Re:Considering the reputation that megaupload had by Mitreya · 2013-01-20 13:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think, like so many other websites, he will have trouble monitizing the service without becoming obnoxious.
I assume he may be going for paid premium accounts
When I use a free (valuable) service, I always consider (and sometimes purchase) the premium account. Seems fair.
Re:Teething Problems by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-20 14:07 · Score: 2, Insightful

Lesson from this: write your password in clear text in a terminal window or notepad or something else that is local to your computer, write it down and then cut/paste it into the password dialogue. Then unless you have issues using cut-n-paste, you should know exactly what the password is, even with a "enter once" system.
Re:Considering the reputation that megaupload had by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2013-01-20 14:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

The artists want out of these RIAA handcuffs as badly as do their fans. They see there is a different, more direct model that doesn't fatten the talentless go-betweens sitting in air-conditioned offices, producing no value at either end of the production pipeline.
Sorry, Mr. Ego Hat, David Geffen.

--
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Re:Kim versus Google by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-20 15:12 · Score: 2, Insightful

He won't be showing ads on your pages. You don't even have pages. You just have HTML that my browser fetches from your server. My browser will show his ads, which I chose to see.
Are you pissed at me when I walk to the fridge during the commercials on TV? Is someone suing Coca Cola for luring me to it?
Here's a hint: if you don't want your ads filtered, be it by Mega or anyone else, integrate them into your content. That's right, serve them from your own server and give them filenames that don't scream "ad". We'll both be happier - you because I see your ads, me because you're not trying to shove Google's tracking down my throat.
Re:Teething Problems by X.25 · 2013-01-20 19:10 · Score: 1, Insightful

Not being able to reset the password on their side is a feature.
Not requiring password confirmation is a bug, and a pretty amateurish one, to be perfectly honest.
Password is required in order to confirm/create the account, you can not do it without entering password after you've clicked on the confirmation URL provided in an email.