He promised it about three months ago and now Kim Dotcom opened Mega, his new encrypted file hosting service with servers distributed in various countries but of course not in the U.S.A. because of the obvious risk of further seizures.

Kim Dotcom also reiterated his intention to open Megabox, a streaming music service. It’s an idea he already had long ago halted as a result of the legal problems he had last year.

Exactly one year after Megaupload and Megavideo were shut down Mega was opened. It offers 50 GB free to anyone who wants to register. It’s already a considerable amount of space but for those who want to have even more storage space there’s the possibility to choose one of the pay packages which obviously have different costs. You can have up to 4 TB and 8 TB of bandwith available.

Initially, a Gabon domain was planned – me.ga – but Kim Dotcom was denied permission by the African nation’s government. Eventually, he created a New Zealand domain and after the irregularities discovered in the legal management of the seizure of his assets it’s clear that in that country they will be careful not to commit further illegal acts.

As you can see from the home page, Kim Dotcom promises a lot: first of all the privacy for users is stressed and immediately below there are the adjectives bigger, better, faster, stronger, safer. Actually, in these early days the system had multiple failures. Kim Dotcom stated that more than one million users registered during the weekend when Mega was opened putting the site under excessive load.

After all, in the pages of the site next to the name Mega there’s the word beta so it’s clear that we can’t expect that everything runs smoothly. We’ll see if things get better when the traffic will be more normal and maybe the structure is set up better.

Mega is made in HTML5 and users are strongly encouraged to use the Chrome browser in order to use the features because it’s the one with the most advanced features. This is explained in detail in a blog and apparently if you try to use another one, even one as good as Firefox, the service becomes unusable.

Kim Dotcom was accused of having opened Mega to make money. Personally, I took this point for granted. We’re talking about a person who’s not exactly a saint and became a hero only because of the treatment he suffered a year ago. Corporations and governments who wanted to see him in jail for various crimes violated several laws in various countries to try to obtain their goal, only to turn him into some kind of martyr. We have only to wait for the next moves in this virtual war.

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