At WorldHostingDays I presented a statistic about the percentage of revenues MegaUpload represented to Carpathia Hosting. Although my sources were credible and corroborated, after further investigation, I believe that statistic to be wrong.
I’d received this statistic from a European host I believed had good information on the number and I’d also vetted it with another industry insider who believed it to be relatively accurate. Carpathia strongly disputes the statistic. To ensure that I’m providing accurate information, and out of respect for Carpathia, I chatted with Phil Shih at Structure Research, a person I trust as a source of unbiased information. Phil did some back of the envelope calculations based on publicly available information. His conclusion: there’s no way that MegaUpload represented nearly the percentage revenue I’d been led to believe. Rather, if anything, it is in the single digits.
http://www.thewhir.com/blog/worldhostingdays-megaupload-clarification
What we do know is that:
- There is 25 Petabyte stored on more than 1,000 “Mega” servers facilitated by Carpathia
- Carpathia argues it is currently costing them $9,000 per day to merely facilitate the non-functional servers. That would be $3,285,000 annually. One wonders whether it would make a difference when the company would be facilitating fully functional server infrastructure. In any event, we need to assume that the company was charging MegaUpload much more than this and that payments will have been made for many years during which MegaUpload was a client of either Carpathia or Leaseweb.
- The indictment shows an example of a $9 million USD payment transferred through PayPal, Inc. by a member of the MegaUpload Conspiracy to hosting provider Leaseweb in the Netherlands where, according to the indictment, 690 “Mega” servers were located. Could this put the guesstimate for Carpathia with its 1,000 servers at 13 million USD for the same period of time? How much would the total amount have been for the entire period of time when MegaUpload was a client at each of these providers? In any event, the indictment also mentions examples of payments by MegaUpload to Carpathia’s CFO directly, totalling 1.46 million USD. Again, one wonders just how many payments like this the justice department was able to uncover and how many payments like this were made to the two hosting providers and/or their CEOs directly during the time MegaUpload was their customer.
- In 2011 The Dutch OCOM Group, owner of hosting provider Leaseweb, datacenter EvoSwitch, Network services company FiberRing and provider of modular datacenters DataXenter enjoyed a total revenue of 50 million EUR.
- In 2009 the revenue generated by Leaseweb individually would amount to 36 million EUR.
- Carpathia Hosting’s revenue for 2010 is estimated at 52.9 million USD.
- The indictment also mentions examples of various payments by MegaUpload to one of Leaseweb’s carriers called Cogent Communications which totalled 30 million USD from February 2009 to July 2011. Could that amount reflect the amounts paid to Carpathia and Leaseweb and/or their CEOs during the same window of time? How much would the total amount have been?
- Updated on 13th April 2012: The US government claims that Carpathia has generated $35 million from working with MegaUpload.
- Updated on 14th April 2012: MegaUpload put Carpathia on the map. The company was largely unheard of 2009. That was when researchers from the University of Michigan and Arbor Networks reported they had discovered something unusual. In July that year, that 0.6 percent of all Internet traffic for the month was delivered by a little known Web hosting service: Carpathia.That was equivalent to double the amount of bandwidth consumed by Facebook and nearly half of all of Microsoft’s Web properties, including Bing, Forbes noted in a story from November that year. The researchers traced the massive traffic wave to a deal Carpathia had struck a year earlier to service MegaUpload and the other sites operated by founder Kim DotCom: Megarotica, Megavideo, Megaclick. Forbes’ reporter Andy Greenberg wrote then that the sites had “become the digital equivalent of the Somalian coastline in the fight against online piracy.“
In any event, the above does not give credibility to the “single digit” assessment when the payments noted are being combined and extrapolated taking into account the overall amount of time MegaUpload has been with Carpathia and Leaseweb individually.
Previously:
Internet Lawyer David Snead’s Quote About MegaUpload Gets Censored. WHIR Author Liam Eagle Doesn’t Say What Percentage Of Carpathia’s and Leaseweb’s Revenue Had Been Generated By The MegaUpload Operation
http://vrritti.com/2012/03/28/internet-lawyer-david-sneads-quote-about-megaupload-gets-censored-whir-author-liam-eagle-doesnt-say-what-percentage-of-carpathias-and-leasewebs-revenue-had-been-generated-by-the-megaupload-op/
MegaUpload represented 25 percent of Carpathia Hosting’s revenue, and 30 percent of LeaseWeb’s revenue
http://vrritti.com/2012/03/24/megaupload-represented-25-percent-of-carpathia-hostings-revenue-and-30-percent-of-leasewebs-revenue/
