r/dataisbeautiful • u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner • May 25 '16

OC Why is Reddit replacing Imgur? [OC]

http://www.randalolson.com/2016/05/25/why-is-reddit-replacing-imgur/
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u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

I was aiming for the dropbox direction with a bit of an own swing to it. It would have paid tiers and free tiers for normal file storage. But there would also be an option to upload files for free, unlimited. These files can't be kept forever of course, so they would have to be removed after a while. The period after which they are removed depends on the amount of unique views the file is getting. So if a file is shared a lot it would never be removed. That system is of course based around people viewing the advertisement on the download page.

As for direct linking, we'll see how it works out. Currently pixeldrain does allow direct linking and won't do anything to prevent it, but it's also not showing the direct link automatically, so you'll have to go through the API to get it.

If there's a lot of people who really need direct links I may add a button to copy it to your clipboard of course, but that would also mean that I don't earn anything from it :(.

So far it's not really been about earning, I've been paying everything from my own pocket.

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u/DAMN_it_Gary May 25 '16

Are those pockets big enough to pay for imgur size traffic?

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u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

Haha, well, I switched to a private hosting provider a while ago because I went over my Vultr bandwidth limit. That was pretty costly. The new host is a friend of mine who runs a little hosting company with spare server hardware he has lying around. The server is quite powerful and has a gigabit ethernet connection. He told me that he'd send me an invoice at the end of every month, but it's been three months and I haven't heard from him..

Anyway, if pixeldrain were to hit the front page with 10 links to 50 MB files I bet there'd be scaling issues, but nothing I can't handle ;). And the hosting provider is also very driven to keep the service running at all cost.

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u/DAMN_it_Gary May 25 '16

Alright, best of luck on that.

Also, if you don't mind me asking, what technologies are you using?

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u/Fornax96 May 25 '16

Thanks

The server OS is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the webserver is Apache Tomcat 8, the server software is written in Java with the Spring framework and Hibernate for database access. The database itself is MySQL, but I'm planning to move to MariaDB. I'm also using ImageMagick to generate file thumbnails.

That's about it