By Drew Wilson
It was a much anticipated launch – Kim Dotcom’s new website “Mega” opened its doors today to much fanfare. While the website was greeted with positive reviews amongst outlets that were able to get an early sneak peak, the grand opening to the public caused such a surge in traffic, the load more or less brought the website down to its knees.
It’s probably one of the best problems a website administrator could ever hope for. On opening, the website gets inundated with so much traffic, it brings the website down to its knees. Our attempts to access Mega proved fruitless as we were greeted with server timeouts from the excess load. Of course, such a problem tends to be a temporary problem as either administrators work the servers to better handle such a load or the traffic dies down after a while.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the reviews as many managed get a sneak peak. Some of the features include a 50GB storage limit for free users and end-to-end encryption. Like the old MegaUpload website, Mega will also feature a DMCA system for rightsholders to take down copyrighted material deemed infringing. The site also has more than 1000 hosts for the purpose of storage and redundancy to ensure that the files remain available – though naturally none of the hosts exist in the US.
Kim Dotcom was in good spirits as he watched the traffic explode onto the servers.
“Wow.” wrote Dotcom, “I have never seen anything like this. From 0 to 10 Gigabit bandwidth utilization within 10 minutes.”
When the traffic kept surging, he wrote, “Site is extremely busy. Currently thousands of user registrations PER MINUTE. ”
An hour later, Dotcom said, “100,000 registered users in less than 1 hour. Fastest growing startup in Internet history?”
He also added, “Site is still overloaded. Massive demand. Incredible. I am so happy. Thank you for using #Mega.”
Of course, the traffic surge kept going and he wrote, “250,000 user registrations. Server capacity on maximum load. Should get better when initial frenzy is over. Wow!!!”
As of this writing, one of his last comments before he signed off was, “I need some sleep. The guys are working on balancing the load. What a day. Will sleep with a big smile.”
It’s really no surprise he’d be happy given the problems he had while launching the new site. Earlier, we noted that the sites advertising was pulled from radio stations thanks to pressure from the record labels. In addition, a few months ago, the original Me.ga domain was pulled from the government of Gabon after the United States government complained. This large amount of traffic would obviously be that much sweeter for the entrepreneur.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85
