Kim Dotcom reveals the new Mega

Love him or hate him, Kim Dotcom isn't going away. The man on trial in New Zealand for piracy and racketeering has just begun the relaunch of his Mega empire.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom had all of his Mega-branded websites taken down after a police raid in January this year. The websites provided various file-sharing services, including direct downloads and video streaming.

The new website, simply called Mega and located at me.ga, will host users' data as Megaupload did, but this time it will be encrypted and hosted all over the world by many different hosting partners.

Aside from being more private and harder for authorities to take down, that should make data transfers faster.

Mega is calling for hosting companies to become partners. However, the company will not work with hosting companies based in the USA.

"It is not safe for cloud storage sites or any business allowing user-generated content to be hosted on servers in the United States or on domains like .com or .net," the company said on its new website.

The splash page launched at 1pm NZT. Shortly after, Dotcom tweeted, "Servers overloaded. Adding capacity." The service itself will launch on January 20, 2013.

"Millions of users hitting at once. I'm delighted by the interest. But servers can't handle it. The new Mega will."

Dotcom said the company would need 60 "state-of-the-art" portal servers at launch.

The company has raised enough money to cover the launch of Mega, but is currently looking for investors to help "to provide Mega free of charge for as long as possible".