Kim Dotcom Claims 1 Million ‘Mega’ Users In First 24 Hours

Kim Dotcom has announced that his new Mega service has attracted more than one million users since launching just 24 hours ago. The website located at Mega.co.nz is the founders response to the United States Department of Justice’s shut down of popular file sharing service MegaUpload.

First adopters to the Mega service receive an industry leading 50GB of storage for no cost. In comparison, the popular cloud file service Dropbox offers customers 2GB at no charge.

Because of issues with US Department of Justice shutdowns in the United States, the new Mega service features the following message:

“Unfortunately, we can’t work with hosting companies based in the United States. Safe harbour for service providers via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been undermined by the Department of Justice with its novel criminal prosecution of Megaupload. It is not safe for cloud storage sites or any business allowing user-generated content to be hosted on servers in the United States or on domains like .com / .net. The US government is frequently seizing domains without offering service providers a hearing or due process.”

While files are not hosted in the United States, customers in the US can sign up for the service and use it as they see fit.

Users who need more space and larger bandwidth allowances can choose to pay between $9.99 (500GB storage and 1GB bandwidth) and $29.99 (4TB storage and 8TB bandwidth).

At this time, the Mega.co.nz website is operational and accepting users from all over the world. Just be cautious that the site is loading slow as millions of users attempt to grab a first look at the service.

Before its launch, Mega began to seek out hosting companies all over the world asking for organizations that could provide unmetered bandwidth and large amounts of storage space at low prices.

Unlike Megaupload, the new service providers users with decryption keys directly inside of their web browsers, ensuring state of the art 2056-bit RSA encryption that is controlled by the user and not the cloud storage company.

Here’s the full MEGA launch press conference:

Next up will be the Mega service known as Megabox. That new service will allow musicians to upload their own music and earn royalties from their work. According to Kim Dotcom:

“Megabox is still under development. It will take at least another six month before that site goes live. I’m a perfectionist and I’m not going to release a product that I’m not 100% sure of. And Megabox still needs some improvements. But it’s going to be an awesome site, it’s definitely going to change the music industry.”

Dotcom says Megabox will give the power back to the artists and creators of content. Artists using Megabox will keep 90 percent of revenue earned from the service.