As the company can't pay its hosting bills, since its accounts have been frozen

Jan 30, 2012 11:21 GMT  ·  By

The MegaUpload arrests are still making waves in the file-sharing world. Cyberlockers around the world are rethinking their business, sites that depended on them are left high and dry, while their users aren't sure about the future of their files.

No one has it worse than MegaUpload users though, as the site has been down since the raids took place. Anyone that had files stored on the site had no warning and has no way of accessing them.

Still, there was at least the hope that the files, while inaccessible, were still left intact on MegaUpload's servers. Of course, for those hosting copyright infringing content, 'dread' is perhaps a better word that 'hope.'

But that may not last, apparently, all the files hosted by MegaUpload are about to be deleted, within days, since the company can no longer pay its hosting bills, due to the simple fact that its accounts have been frozen.

Unable to pay its bills, MegaUpload can't convince the hosting companies storing its files to keep doing so. Given that MegaUpload is one of the world's largest websites, its storage bills can be quite large.

What's more, since its future is uncertain to say the least, no hosting company is going to store huge amounts of data on the hope that MegaUpload will be able to pay them someday.

All of this leaves tens of millions of users in an uneasy place. Granted, for most, having their MegaUpload files deleted may be an inconvenience, since they need to find other places to store them, repair broken links and so on.

For some, this also means that they lose out on premium subscription money they may have paid. But for some it's worse than that, with so many users, many people have stored files on MegaUpload that they have nowhere else. Soon, they may be lost forever.