By 3 News online staff
It was launched with plenty of hoopla and hype last week, but how is Kim Dotcom's Mega cloud storage website faring one week on?
Technology commentator Ben Gracewoods says it "launched with a bang", a surge that saw the new site buckle under the weight of millions of visitors.
"[It was the] 140th most-trafficked website a couple of days later, so you can imagine they had issues with the load, and dealing with that kind of stuff," Mr Gracewood told Firstline this morning.
"They seem to have fine-tuned it – it's getting a bit better now, but also the popularity has tailed off, so they're down around 800th most-popular website now."
Mr Gracewood says the jury is still out on whether the site will be a success.
"A lot of that traffic was tyre-kickers possibly – people looking at it to see what it was like and whether it was any good. It'll be interesting to see if it settles into a lower level of use, or whether it comes back up again as people enjoy using it."
What sets Mega apart from its competitors like Google Drive and Dropbox is that it encrypts files in the browser before uploading them to the cloud, so not even Mega can see what's being held on their servers.
It's been suggested this is a perfect service for pirates and paedophiles to use, but Mr Gracewood is sceptical.
"Yes, absolutely, it could be – but so could anything else on the internet," he says.
"People who desperately want to hide stuff are already hiding stuff. What Mega does, I guess, is make it easier to use this encryption, and that's an interesting fact in of itself – if people are so desperate for encryption, wouldn't there be services out there doing this sort of encryption already?"
3 News
source: newshub archive
