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“Soon we realised we were unable to fund our growth through advertising,” says Ortmann, “so we decided to allow people to [pay to] upgrade their accounts for more storage, better throughput and more bandwidth allowance.”

The prospect of premium accounts was seized upon with enthusiasm, and revenue started to increase — as did the demands on the system and those running it. “From there,” says Ortmann, “it was all about managing growth.”

The technology was frozen in 2005, care of the “short cut” taken to speed the site online.

“We were unable to really make fundamental changes to the site,” says Ortmann. Using existing technology, the technical pairing of Ortmann and van der Kolk managed to “scale” the operation until the raid in 2012. “The site was less and less contemporary and more and more anachronistic implementation of the idea. We could not have tripled the number of uploads per second because we only had a single database chain for this purpose and it was already getting jammed and we would have had to upgrade to newer hardware all the time. At some point newer hardware would have been unavailable — hardware that would be able to process all of this in a single thread. All of these things were difficult to handle.”

Megaupload soared in popularity. For van der Kolk, very much the junior member of the partnership, it was an incredible thrill to be named in the top 100 websites by the industry’s Alexa ranking system. “Having such immense traffic and having gone through so many learning curves. There is so much growth. That is a learning school no money can buy. It is something so unique.”

However, the business was not alone in the market. Others had similar ideas and created sites which began to form the basis of the cyber-locker community — places where data could be stored online. There were “hundreds of competitors” by 2007, says van der Kolk.

The Megaupload A-Team split up into their respective roles and worked hard. Finn Batato was the smooth-talking, widely travelled public relations whiz. Ortmann led van der Kolk in streamlining the technical aspects of the website. The software was bespoke and crafted to squeeze the greatest performance it could out of the hardware to which it was bound. “We were one of the first and were able to push a very low-end machine with super-efficient tweaks.”

Dotcom handled the negotiations, van der Kolk recalls. “We had super-aggressive deals because of Dotcom with the bandwidth — we always undercut the market. Dotcom was super-aggressive with his negotiating.”

The designer software was also an advantage, with the efficiencies offering customers advantages over other sites. The competitors in the

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