Last night many users experienced some downtime when a few of our servers remained offline during routine maintenance. The issue was resolved after maintenance completed.

MyMS Cache Rewards have been processed. Make sure to add your Paypal email, by clicking "Update Profile" in your My Megashares account, if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to add your Paypal email, by clicking "Update Profile" in your My Megashares account, if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

Web team will update the FAQ page this week - effective immediately all links must be at least 5MB filesize to qualify for cache points.

UPDATE-
There was an error in our payment system that did not cover multiple M1 payouts. The adjustment has been made and payments will be sent out by Monday, September 14, 2009.

UPDATE-
MyMS Cache Payouts have been sent out.

MyMS Cache Payouts will be sent out on September 4th.

Make sure to add your Paypal email, by clicking "Update Profile" in your My Megashares account, if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

Our FTP upload servers are currently delayed in syncing back online with the file storage systems. Services will be restored as soon as possible, but could take up to a week due to hardware issues.

We had an extended outage on Sunday Aug 23.2009 through Monday Aug 24.2009 when we increased capacity with a new datacenter, lasting under 12 hours.

Marketing and Customer department are working on the number of days credit we want to provide to our customers.

Your account should reflect this increase within the next 3 business days.


--UPDATE--
Accounts have been credited with an additional 7 days.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to add your Paypal email, by clicking "Update Profile" in your My Megashares account, if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

Marketing has exciting news for Free users, this weekend (July 10-12) starting on Friday afternoon, Free users will get up to 1000MB of download bandwidth per passport. That's 1TB of data for each time your passport renews (passports renew every 2 hours regardless of the amount used).

Engineering was working with Marketing for this Bonus Weekend to ensure paying users will not be affected. If anything, My Megashares users should see an increase in cache (reward) points with more download activity and new link card sign ups.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to add your Paypal email, by clicking "Update Profile" in your My Megashares account, if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

Keep an eye out for malicious sites and software! If you go to a site that is not Megashares.com or use 3rd party software not authorized by Megashares.com and enter your link card login, malicious software will take your account credentials and then use your account or share it with others on the internet.

Make sure you do not enter your login anywhere but on Megashares.com. If anyone asks your for your login, they are attempting to Phish it. If an account is phished and shared, our system will automatically terminate that link card.

Please report any sites or software you believe are phishing accounts to abuse@megashares.com

We have taken to heart your feedback with uservoice suggestions. We are currently re-designing Megashares.com and focusing on what you want most. In the meantime, we have stopped development on the old system and have pushed tested, completed code that we feel is a must while we continue on the new system.

In My Megashares you will now see a link labelled "Update Profile" that gives you 3 simple options: Update your MyMS email address, update your password and add/update your Payment email.

My Megashares accounts are separate from link cards, updating your profile will have no affect on your link card login, email or pin.

For link cards, we have added a button allowing you to generate a new PIN. The email you used during purchase are still tied to your link cards and can not be changed unless you email support. To change your PIN, click the Forgot/Lost/Change Login in the footer links.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to add your Paypal email, by clicking "Update Profile" in your My Megashares account, if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to email support at megashares dot com with your Paypal email if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

We are sure you all have noticed the alert on our download page, and if you have not heard from various news feeds, there is a major Swine Flu Pandemic currently in our world.

While we hope this virus is resolved in short order, we still are supporting a sister site created from a small Megashares team dedicated to keeping us up to date on the H1N1 virus.

We want to remove the notification soon, but not until we are all safe and in the clear.

We will include that link here as well: The Swine Flu Facts

We are going to open up the download amount for free users. We will monitor traffic and if we see it starts to affect paying users we will revert back.

We are doubling the amount from 250MB to 500MB for user's download passports. We will run this at least through the Summer if all goes well.

Update

Our paying customers have been moderately affected from the increase. Due to this, we are reverting back to the 250MB per passport for free users.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to email support at megashares dot com with your Paypal email if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to email support at megashares dot com with your Paypal email if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

We upgraded our databases!

You should notice faster response times while using the site, uploads and downloads probably will not benefit as much.

There was a 15 minute maintenance outage window, any uploads or downloads during that window were stopped.

Paypal apparently performed some unannounced maintenance or had some issue they have not released yet regarding their automated payment system.

Due to this, users that purchased a link card in the past 2-3 hours (Feb 10, 21:00-23:59) will have a 1-3 hour delay receiving their link card information.

We apologize on Paypal's behalf.

There was an unexpected ~5 hour outage this morning starting around 4:10am PST when our provider upgraded a switch unsuccessfully.

All is well now.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to email support at megashares dot com with your Paypal email if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

Today, Jan 17th and tomorrow, Jan 18th, we are performing major upgrades to our switches and network backbone.

There will be some outages spanning ~1h for most users, while some will have DNS issues until their DNS provider receives the propagated updates.

Speeds should be greatly improved for users not already maxing out their ISP limits.

-Update-

All major updates were completed successfully as expected.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to email support at megashares dot com with your Paypal email if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

We have received some emails, from our overseas customers, about timeouts and sudden dropped downloads. These emails started around December 20th, 2008. We have found the reason as to why, there were major cables that were cut that provided internet and phone to Middle East and Asia. Please read more about the situation here: http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssIntegratedTelecommunicationsServices/idUSLK37775420081220

We apologize to all. We had a bad crash that lasted approximately 8 hours. Anyone downloading with a counted linkcard would be charged a download, however, you still can complete it without another deduction - our system works like this by default.

As for new customers, we will have to re-create your linkcards and email them out. Support is already processing them and will have your linkcards emailed out ASAP. If you do not receive yours, please contact support.

MyMS Cache Payouts have been processed. Make sure to email support at megashares dot com with your Paypal email if you have over 25,000 cache points and would like to participate in the My Megashares Cache program.

We are still performing upgrades and increasing capacity. We hope to have this completed before the thanksgiving holidays to give our hard working engineers well deserved time off.

Had a small crash this morning. Engineering has resolved the issue. Nobody is hurt, everyone is fine. Sorry for the interruption.

Also, we will have a couple planned maintenance outages for upgrades in the next 48 hours. They should be under 30minutes and not noticed by most.

We are running behind on our MyMS Payouts due to minor technical issues with Paypal. You should receive yours by Nov 8 (within the next 48 hours).

--UPDATE-- Some payments were sent out and we experienced another technical issue. You will get your Payout for your cache points as soon as we can resolve the issue. We apologize for the delay to those yet to receive theirs.

Current ETA is Monday, November 10th.

--UPDATE-- All payouts have been issued.

We apologize on behalf of a very naughty switch. Many of you might be seeing lower download speeds than usual due to a switch that is awaiting replacement. We just recently upgraded a different switch and our guess is this switch got upset.

If experiencing slow speeds, we will extend your linkcard equal time until this switch is replaced which looks to be early to mid next week of Oct 6th.

We've opened up a Cafepress store! Enjoy your favorite articles of clothing, gifts and more with our famous Megashares logo and various captions (emphasis on humor).

Look for new product releases as we have encouraged the entire company to submit their witty captions and enjoyable artwork.

We had some downtime from a minor update to a switch. All is well now.

We've setup hotlinking for images under 1MB. We are rolling it out as a beta and it is free for all (requires registering a free My Megashares account).
If your image is hotlink-able, you will see a new list item and text box labeled "Hotlink:". We look to expand the hotlink features with more template text boxes for ease of pasting into your web pages and communities.
Hotlinked images currently fall under the same file retention policy (meaning impressions do not count as user downloads from megashares.com).

You asked: How long will Megashares keep my files without a download? Can it be increased?
We have received your feedback and complied to your requests!
We have increased our file retention policy to 45 days. 1 unique download in 15 days and 10 unique downloads in 45 days, then the 45 day counter will restart. This is a big jump from our previous FRP and is a nice middle ground until we role out subscriptions that include perpetual diskspace.

UPDATE:
many are asking what happened to older files as they have been removed. We issued the new policy today, that means anything uploaded previous to today was still bound to the old file retention policy. Feel free, as it is free, to re-upload any content that was removed and it will be placed under our new FRP.

We had a brief outage today during some network upgrades. They failed on the first attempt, and succeeded on a second go. We still have a couple more switches to schedule in. Any interruption during the next upgrade will be virtually transparent.

One of our large storage units needs to come offline for repair. The ETA for repair is 1-2 weeks. The data itself is fine and will be returned online after repairs are completed.

[update]
we have activated a snapshot on a backup server that has most of data available up to last week (~5 days).

One of our datacenters will be upgrading their backup systems between 2AM-6AM PDT. We do not plan to have any downtime or outages, however, it is best to be prepared in the event that an upgrade runs long or Murphy's law kicks in where if something can go wrong it will - meaning we will be monitoring their process and if we see the need we may turn down some connections to prevent sudden disruption.

[edit] this has been delayed due to parts not shipping on time. We will update or create a new quickblog when the next update is scheduled.

[edit] updates appear to be complete, however, we did experience a brief period of downtime. All is well now.

Over the next few days we will be upgrading both our front and back end systems. This will basically improve performance. There will be some content unavailable during some upgrades and at times other services will probably show degraded performance while associated systems execute necessary updates.

Soon links will appear when you reach certain My Megashares Cache Levels. These levels are outlined in the FAQ, but here's some exciting excerpts:

Extend your current (or any friend, colleague, etc) linkcard and ability to give points to another user (some need help, some like to help).

[edit]
We forgot to add that you can create a NEW linkcard from your cache points. There have been many emails (thanks!) asking if it is possible to create linkcards for other users, the answer is yes and we will support them as regular linkcard users!

this qb is getting long but just to be clear: you can extend ANY linkcard and you can CREATE a new linkcard, you can also extend a linkcard that has been created. Whatever your cache points allow you to do, go for it!

We've changed much here. New tab'd layout giving you more with a single click without pageloads or dialog boxes.

Many more features you will soon see come from your content portal - we'll continue to tik them off as we push 'em.

The Video/Image tabs are in testing. You can create a clip of videos you upload and we'll have lots of features to manage, manipulate and share your visual content.

[edit] we're pushing this code momentarily.

First qkbg (quickblog, the acronym may change at any given time for the sake of humor/insanity/mocking web society)... New Megashares layout. What do you think? (don't really tell us, we are not changing it j/k we will if your suggestion is super cool). If you do think you see a bug or something that makes your eyes twitch lettuce know.

We added a blog! Ahh, not really, it is more like a blog without the clutter, but not tiny like a twit(ter). This is Megashares QuickBlog, short update pops for you to read about what you see (like the new layout). The answers to questions will remain in FAQ and the updates/changes/maintenance to the site will be qb'd here.