Show HN: I made a no-bullshit image host | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a no-bullshit image host

imgz.org

248 pointsstavros247 comments

I've seen your other projects from years ago, e.g. your bookmarks site. I think you have great ideas and skill. I appreciate the effort towards being no bullshit. May I suggest a no-BS approach that replaces highly subjective humor with a copy that focuses on (hopefully also no-bullshit) aspects like

  1. clearly stating how you gonna scale image delivery
  2. clearly stating how you store files
  3. clearly stating how you're financially sustainable

I love businesses with personality. It's just hard to do good humor. This humor reminds me of a 20yo me in college, a time when my sense of narcissism was way outperforming my sense of good taste.

> clearly stating [...]

I don't think #1 and #2 are of interest to users, all the users care about is when they type "imgz.org/myimage.png" the image loads. #3 should be rather clear from the fact that you have to pay, hopefully.

> This humor reminds me of a 20yo me in college, a time when my sense of narcissism was way outperforming my sense of good taste.

Thank you, that's exactly what I was going for!

That kind of humor and response is off putting to me as a potential customer. It gives me the impression that either this website is a bit of joke, or that it's not really meant for people like me (that don't 'get' that kind of humor).

That's fine if that's what you're going for, it's up to you. But FYI you'll lose some customers over it, maybe more than you'd gain.

Yeah, I'm aware of that, but I'm not terribly serious about this being a viable business and I want that to come across. I made this because I wanted something like it, and I'm opening it up to people to use with me, with the understanding that it's not meant to be a Real Business(TM).

If it super blows up and has the potential to put food on the table, I might reconsider, but I don't think it's ever going to be more than a small group of happy users.

You're suggesting turning it into a bullshit image host.

I thought about doing this as a form of easily managed passive income.

But then I remembered: copyright takedown requests and child pornography. Keeping on top of bad actors with an image host sounds like a huge headache! And if you grow that means you have to hire people, and then how do you keep the price so low?

Good luck!

Yeah, that's my worry as well. Hopefully the fact that people have to pay will curb that a bit, but yeah, I'm worried about it.

I would hope so. I imagine the child pornographers aren't too keen on handing over payment data with their names in.

Yeah, I hope I won't have to get rid of the free trial or cryptocurrency payment, but I might...

I'm not a Google fan by any means, but you might explore the Content Safety API [1] they're offering to partners. Thorn might also offer something similar [2].

[1] https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/using...

[2] https://www.thorn.org/

That's very promising, thank you for the information. It might come in very handy, though I hope not.

Just keep an eye out for bad actors trying to use stolen credit cards

What, like Sylvester Stallone? Why would he do such a thing?

You mean Sylvester Stallone who was nominated for best actor for Rocky?

Did he win? No. QED.

You should be worried. This will be abused in a matter of days if not hours.

And he even allows payment by bitcoin! I can't imagine who would want to host images without being traceable...

Bitcoin is traceable

I found the "Money" page (https://imgz.org/money/ )'s marketing style extremely distasteful and offensive.

I understand the author is trying to be cool and all, but this is too much by piling up vulgar words all over, IMO.

I donated because I like makers who don't take things too seriously.

EDIT: @StavrosK, consider making the "From" set in your hello email to something prettier than "hello"

Hmm, what would you suggest?

IcanHas Imgz? Not picky, just thought you might want to polish that just a tad.

I'll think about it, but I thought "hello" was better than "noreply" or something similar.

I'll send you a screenshot from my Inbox so you can see how it compares to other mailing lists. hello is not bad, it could just be a bit more descriptive so I know it comes from Imgz.

Plus, the author seems not to know the difference between “vulva” and “vagina.”

That killed it for me right there, don't even need to go to the site. Thanks for saving me the trouble.

No one cares.

Somehow, "having to sell photos of your vulva" doesn't have the same comedic beat to it.

Pictures of the latter usually include the former as well, but not always...

Yup; don't mind a little informality, but all this shit and asses and fucks are trying too hard, don't really want to give my money to a project that markets itself as this hypercool.

Oof, man, tough crowd. There are 3 instances of "shit", 2 of "bullshit", 1 "cheapass" and 1 "fuck" in the public pages.

This would qualify as PG if it were a movie. I mean, you like what you like, but how much cussing is "just enough" for you?

Exactly 1 swear feels indie and charming. More than that feels like trying.

Ah, the MPAA way. It's hard to get the "angry owner" tone out with one swear, one swear says "professional but kind of flustered". I don't like gratuitous swearing either, but I think I got it right with the copy there (at least for my aesthetic).

It's been a while since I read all of it at once, though, I wil re-read and adjust, thanks.

The language is fine. I actually find it much more refreshing than the usual onslaught on buzzword laden services that pop up on HN. You can edit the language as much as you want, the puritans won't be satisfied.

If this is your hobby project, I doubt you are looking for enterprise signups who are pretty anal about such things. This will mostly used by individuals, who mostly wouldn't mind at worst, or be amused by it at best.

Oh I agree with you 100%, it's just that this copy has gone through various iterations, and you need to step back once in a while and read all of it to see if it blends together well, which I haven't done in a while.

I, too, dislike people who try to be funny by cursing, because it feels facile. I just read the copy again now and there were a few cases where the cursing felt gratuitous, rather than for a specific effect, so I have changed those.

I find your commenting style extremely distasteful and offensive.

I understand the you are trying to be cool and all, but this is too much by piling up vulgar words ("anal") all over, IMO.

I don't think the site owner exactly cares about having customers, is why.

I found it humorous. The last thing I want to see is yet another startup website using artificially enthusiastic copy to sell their plans. All that tells me is that they're just waiting for their own Imgur moment.

That's not to say that this site may be headed there as well, but at least we can enjoy some irreverent copy in the meantime.

Agree 100%, but I did get a laugh out of the "Our Choice" banner on the "buy the site" tier.

This is for you: https://imgz.org/money-safe/

That was hilarous. Thanks!

Thank you Stavros, take my money now! LOL.

Just click "buy now" ty.

Hahahaha, this is gold!

i just furrying love you

If you want to increase your sales you should add a counter like this on the most expensive offer:

    "Limited offer. {random(2, 100)} just bough this plan."

#pro-tip

I like your style, booking.com growth hacker.

It's a joke. Being distasteful and offensive was the entire point...

I felt like it was humorous and fun, a tounge in the cheek style not meant to be taken seriously.

Change vagina to mangina to lessen sexism

I remember the day that Imgur launched on Reddit. The post title was something almost exactly like this. At the time it was a revolution, every other photo upload site was shady or slow or expensive or some combination of the above.

~10 years later and Imgur is basically a social network itself. I hate seeing an imgur link now.

Photo upload doesn't seem to be something that can be offered in a way that pleases everyone. I wish you the best of luck in pleasing at least some people!

Thanks! I think Imgur got the "I want to upload some memes" crowd, I'm going for the "I just want to share a screenshot" crowd.

"My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck. What do you think?

I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)

I'll be listening if anyone has some suggestions."

-- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

I searched for the original imgur posting before clicking this post because I remembered the wording being so similar.

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

> My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck. What do you think?

And their comment explaining it

> I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)

Seems like different goals though. imgur chose ease of use over business sustainability and over the years had to add on more and more ways to make an income.

> ~10 years later and Imgur is basically a social network itself. I hate seeing an imgur link now. Photo upload doesn't seem to be something that can be offered in a way that pleases everyone.

It seems like it can start out good. But then, inevitably, some “product owner” or UX designer won’t be able to keep his or her hands off it, and will eventually ruin it with chat, social features, newsletter subscriptions, JavaScript, scrolljacking, clickjacking. It always ends up like “imgur 10 years later”.

This is how so many good software products go bad. People can’t just leave it alone.

I think a lot of site re-designs are make work for designers. I'm of two minds about it tho. I almost always personally hate re-designs; they're almost entirely extraneous for me. But what else are full-time designers going to do?

In the case of imgur, I think the problem was financial.

Running an image hosting site for you to share memes or screenshots with a couple friends is cheap. But becoming the primary method of posting images to reddit gets extremely expensive fast!

Imgur had to expand. They had to become more. They also had to discourage being only used as a direct image linking site, as they needed a way to serve ads.

The alternative was to go bankrupt.

Seriously, how do you finance a free image hosting service? It's an oxymoron.

Glad this exists. Still does not replace imgur.

You just need a free tier. No way out of that. I am not paying you even $0.01 if I need to upload 2 memes and share it with 5 people. I can afford it but not gonna happen. Here is ideas: make it a subscription. Allow free hosting with no registration but let the image expire (unhost) after N views and rate limit clients. Don't freaking ask me for my email. No, I do not care what your reason is kind sir. It is 2020 basically, don't ask me for my email. Just process the payment and give me a key I can use for futue uploads,ask me to optionally email but man i hate that so much. I don't see why I need any account other than an access token,but even if I do why do I need to give yet another imposing site my email? How about random 5 character subdomains for for payinf accounts and a premium fee for being able to choose the subdomain? All images uploaded with a token get the same subdomain?

Look, I haven't looked too deep into what you do and your business model but with imgur I can still upload pictures for free,which I can link to directly and I quite like being able to share it and have others up/down vote it as a post. You don't do that. Imgur was specifically started because the founder, much like you was frustrated with all the b.s. image hosting options available when uploading to reddit. Right now only people who care about not being the product will pay to use this. Even though I am very much one of those people I can never use it since I am not a frequent image uploader. From what I have seen it replaces imgur as much as a dirt cheap shared webhost does.

But I do applaud your api and acceptance of btc payments. And I subjectively am not impressed by your UI either. Just not attractive.

Fyi: I made these comments tk try and provide honest critique that might be useful to OP.

Pretty sure you're not his target customer then. I'm giving this a whirl with the free trial and will probably end up paying for it, it absolutely replaces imgur for me.

And that is fine. But I could be. Just needs to go all in with the no b.s.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, you have a choice. You can use Imgur, fighting off their user-hostile UI, pay for IMGZ or pay and set up a VPS yourself. For me, the best option was #2, but it didn't exist, so I made it.

And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer!

I dislike a lot of things about imgur, you can't even save a gif on mobile. I would rather use an alternative. I might pay if the service meets my needs. But I have to use btc, which many don't realize can cost 4-5x more than what you charge. For example $10 for me means I have to get btc for $50 to avoid using creditcard(they charge many times more to use cash,etc.... Than using creditcard on an exchange which also asks for ID.)

You should buy $100 of BTC or so and keep it for stuff like this, I like paying with it. The experience is pretty good and you own your money.

I do that for other services but it does not change how I have to spend more,which is fine but more is more and I will spend only if it really solves my needs.

You should use Bisq, it's slow but quite nice.

> And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer.

I don't know, I just tried it quickly on my mobile and everything was smooth. If you hire a designer be sure to get a good one so they don't ruin the simple use case experience.

It's smooth and quick because I bought a $10 theme and removed all the Javascript, it just looks like crap because I suck at design. I'm glad it worked well for you, though, since the reality is I'll probably never afford a designer from the $30/mo this is going to bring in.

I think it looks perfectly fine. I prefer simple 'lean' designs anyways tho.

I do like his "buy a key" approach. He's basically asking for an IMGZ giftcard he can buy without setting up an account.

(Not as the primary model of course, just as an additional payment option)

That's like a free child pornography host pass, I'd rather not.

So is btc... You will need to be much more proactive about that. I can easily get a burner phone i cash, register gmail with it, buy btc , buy vpn with btc and upload to your site. There are better ways to manage and police fraud and crime (ML can very easily detect age and human body -- require human review if ML flags it before hosting it). Or better yet ban all nsfw like tumblr

Yeah, if I get any illegal images from BTC payers I'll take BTC down. Hopefully I won't have to.

Are you going to shut down credit card payments when someone used a stolen card to upload illegal images?

Yes.

I think the grandparent comment was asking if you'd disable credit card payments for everyone, i.e. for your entire site.

Yes! Cash-in-alley only!

> You can use Imgur, fighting off their user-hostile UI

> And yeah, the UI is trash

Uh, so what exactly is the argument in favor of your service again?

It's not user-hostile? I mean, I thought that was obvious.

> You can use Imgur, fighting off their user-hostile UI

What's so bad about the Imgur UI?

I find it extremely pleasing, all I need to do is go to imgur.com and simply drag an image onto the page and there's a publicly avaible link basically available forever... for free

Also, they're original slogan shows how much they cared about improving the experience.... "Imgur: The image sharer that doesn't suck!"

There's no upload link anywhere, just "Get app":

https://imgz.org/ierYBdLi/

If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that.

There are children and people from non-western countries who have trouble accessing payment options, I'll give you that.

> You just need a free tier. No way out of that

No, you need a free tier. Doesn't mean that imgz needs a free tier. Especially if their target market is "people who are already fed up with one of the free hosts".

> If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that.

Now that makes little sense. Why do I care about how a site keeps records of payments? You can create an account on the backend,plenty of sites already allow for guest check outs with no email asked so I don't get what you're on about. Email is a humongous ask for me. I will even pay double to avoid that. No, it is not useful for payment reminders,those are spammy to me. This is why you need to let people opt in! I don't want to give you any email addresses. You will decide some day how valuable your collection of emails and pictures is and you will sale it to the highesr bidder. Even if it is a paid service how can I know you won't get greedy. Also wake up please! Assume email does not exist unless you need to tell users something,and they give consent. You do not need email to host images. I do not wish to use a burner email for your lack of consideration for my consent. I do not wish to receive emails from an image host. If you need email for antifraud you're screwing it up already and I would rather just use AD supported free services because at least they are not tracking me by my email -- a very valuable datapoint for trackers. Once you have my email you can do micro-targeting very easily and basically figure out all there is to know about me. You do not need people's email unless they say they want you to email them. Heck, even if I want your reminders, email is the last way I want to use. Send me login/push notifications. I do not want to expose yet another site to account take over in the event my email is compromised. I seen people lose a lot of moneu because criminals phished their email. If I am paying you with btc, I do not wish to have any billing reminders or anything tracing the transaction to my email! Trust me,please! You do not need email unless you really and specifically with user consent (after a warning dialog) have a reason to use it. Please stop. Not one more decade of ignorance with respect to this subject.

Oh and yeah, I need a free tier but so does OP. That's how you get users. The more you have free tier users, the more users convert to paying and the more sustainable the service becomes.

> The more you have free tier users, the more users convert to paying and the more sustainable the service becomes.

Citation needed.

Sure, something close to subject: protonmail and their free-> premium conversion success. Was on free for a long time myself.

> Why do I care about how a site keeps records of payments?

I think you might want to care because that's a basic requirement of any legal business (or non-profit) pretty much anywhere.

The service is also time-limited. Would you pay some amount for images to be hosted for a limited time? That seems like a perfectly valid decision.

It may not be feasible to accept anonymous payments or accept credit card payments without at least an email address.

Also, services like this must necessarily 'bundle' their specific products, e.g. hosting individual images in the case of this site. The transaction costs, e.g. credit card payment processing fees, preclude charging too small amounts.

Maybe it would be possible to avoid requiring an email address, but then I'd expect they'd have to use your credit card 'fingerprint' as an account/user identifier. But I'm skeptical that any credit card processors would allow that, especially given the possibility (and likelihood) that people will upload illegal images like child pornography.

B.s., how does protonmail/vpn let me create accounts without a prior email? They do sms verification or arbitrary donation for antifraud. Yes, like an expiring paste, i don't care if an image i shared expires after a while. This site and many others accept btc payment. It is also a growing trend to allow guest checkouts without registration. A business needs to keep records but that is a backend problem,you can record individual transactions with unique IDs and be done with it. Unless you're in finance you don't need to track users (money laundering)

Also, an email or other means for the service to contact you, the user, is necessary for account recovery. Building a SaaS product without any efficient way to recover a lost password is silly. It leads to a ton of customer service headaches.

No it is not! You do not need and should not use email for password recovery. Ok, let's say you do that, what happens when you have 2FA? Both factors of authentication will be thwarted if your email is compromised? That is ridiculous! There are practical and simple solutions (such as recovery tokens, push notifications,etc...). Look, I don't you realize how often people's email gets compromised and how many intermediaries read and log email bodies. There are efficient ways. I mean ffs, do you need a valid email to sign up for email providers?? How do they handle resets? There arr many ways. The only thing worse than email is "secret" questions.

This is obviously a somewhat niche use case, but given you accept Bitcoin, you might be open to it.

I'd love to be able to upload files for a very small fee (few pennies) with no account, and then allow anyone with a link to the file to top up the hosting funds for the image. If you run a lightning node, this would be perfectly feasible for sub-penny amounts.

> allow anyone with a link to the file to top up the hosting funds for the image

This is a genuinely differentiating feature and might be useful even without the Bitcoin aspect. It's easy to imagine someone being annoyed by a deep linked image going away - but being able to pay to revive it.

I agree. You likely could tackle this by requiring users to have accounts that they can deposit funds into (with some minimum to avoid credit card fees), and distribute to pages.

The big advantage with microtransactions is that users don't need accounts.

There's a strategy I only saw applied [twice, forgot another team was using this somewhere else] but I've been stumping for it every place else (I may almost have my current team convinced)

If you segregate classes of service (consumer/producer/admin, or paying/non-paying), then you can over-allocate one class of service to guarantee responsiveness. The most obvious cost is that you need monitoring to make sure all classes of service are working, but you tend to have that anyway.

With this structure, the HN hug of death still leaves your admin console running even while the public traffic is falilng over. Logged in users can still modify content. Or in the case of an image service, paying customers are undersubscribed and free tier is oversubscribed.

In my situation, the customers are responsible for most of the CPU load on the system. We could throttle them while keeping their customer's requests highly responsive.

> Glad this exists. Still does not replace imgur. You just need a free tier. No way out of that.

Having a free tier is what turned imgur into the mess that it is now. When it start it was a no-bullshit image host. But how do you host images for free?

Not true. They were free only, free was not a tier. Paying customers support it.

I like your ideas, but how do you retain control of your account?

How do you prove that you are the owner?

If someone manages to log in as you and takes over your account, how do you get it back without giving some method to contact you.

Recovery token. It can optionally be emailed but you will be advised to write it down on paper -- this is already done with some 2FA auth. Let me flip tables:what if someone got access to your email and took over your image hosting account. How will you recover? Now they have access to private images and they can host illegal content and you will have to prove in court your account was taken over.

I like pen and paper because you can lock it away somewhere safe. If your physical security is bad anyways, no recovery method can help you. Offline,simple and unhackable.

I do like the tone of barely suppressed rage. With a bit of advertising you can become the Pinboard of image hosting as others go through the failure cycle.

Thanks, I figured I might as well have fun with the copy on one of my side-projects, and this one seemed suitable.

Imgur's origin:

"I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)"

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...

I remember when imgur started as well, it was born out of the same sentiment, but chose an unsustainable financial model (in my opinion). I think $5/yr strikes a good balance between "an easy place to share some images" and "not expensive enough that the average person will have trouble paying".

It's refreshing to be able to click on the image and be taken to the high res version. When imgur took that away I basically gave up on it.

If you're too lazy to sign up for the trial and upload an image to experience this awesome feature, have a gander at my child instead, he's adorable in my completely unbiased opinion: https://imgz.org/itZhcEHM/

I approve.

I love the small detail that "Buying the site" is recommended as "Our Choice". Hilarious copywriting.

Thank you! Still waiting for takers, though, so it must not be very effective.

Maybe a 'best value' option would help.

"most popular"?

i lol'd

Nice work! I appreciate your tone, the project, and everything. Heck, I appreciate you man.

(Subscribing now...)

Also this is a great idea and really needed. It’s amazing that something so simple is hard to implement without the shady factor. Resist the temptation to grow and take VC and do all those things that will sour your soul.

Also nobody is going to offer me VC money for a weekend project, so you're safe!

I like it. Imgur used to be fine but is now terrible. Specifically the nasty things they do to mobile browsers.

I now host my own images, but I will share this link with my friends who can't/won't selfhost images.

That's exactly why I built this, because I wanted a no-hassle way to share images. It also has a very convenient CLI utility (pip install imgz-cli) that lets you upload with one command, or from various apps or whatnot. There's also a very simple API.

>CHEAPASS: $5 Per Year. 1 GB

What does 1 GB mean? Is that bandwidth or storage? And if it's bandwidth, what happens if I go over that amount?

It's storage.

What happens when/if I run out? Would I have the option to delete my old images to make room for new ones?

Yes, you can delete old images. I also plan to have an option per-image to auto-expire after a few days, for ephemeral images for when I need to show someone a screenshot or something.

What happens when my 1 MB image gets a million hits from reddit and I consume a terabyte of data transfer?

If you do that often, you'll get an email from me so we can figure out what to do about your bandwidth-hungry successes.

> We have CDNs and Rust and all that fast crap. It's amazing.

Where’s the rust? What is it used for? I couldn’t find it on the repo.

It's aspirational! I meant to write the CLI in it but I'm better with Python so expediency won, but I do hope to write some of it in Rust at some point.

So it's not true. You don't have rust?

I do have Rust: https://gitlab.com/stavros/imgz/blob/master/main.rs

Gotta keep the fanboys happy.

Hahahahahahaha! That's a commentary on marketing, right?

yeah spent like 5 mins looking through project trying to figure out where rust is!

Right now it's iron but give it time!

You can’t fool Rust devs. Gimme Rust!!!!

Make a PR! I need a better command line client.

Can you walk through how you're managing storage of these photos? I've thought about doing something similar, but VPS like DO have very little HDD space. And Amazon S3 is massively expensive.

How are you handling the dollar expense vs storage capacity?

I'm sticking them all in a Postgres database with CloudFlare in front as a caching proxy. Hetzner gives me 3 TB of bandwidth per month, so I expect that to last me a long time.

If CloudFlare hates my usage and I get enough users to make $50/mo, I'll buy a dedicated Hetzner server which comes with a 3 Gbit connection, which will hopefully mean that bandwidth still isn't a problem (or just pay CloudFlare).

What plan are these on? I use them and I don't recall either a VM or any dedicated server match those specs (20T, or 1G unmetered, respectively)

The 3 TB is any VPS they have, and the 1 Gb (or 3 Gb? I forget) is any of their dedicated servers.

It's 1G "somewhat-shared" unmetered per dedicated and 20TB on their VMs. I don't believe they've ever offered a 3 TB option.

Good choice though, their NVMe is also really nice on the VM line.

Ah, yes, you're right, it's 20 TB. I think you can pay them for a dedicated pipe, but I've never looked into it...

It's usually cheaper to just get another dedicated server and make sure it's in a different DC zone.

Ah, true, I'll keep that in mind.

AFAIK the dedicated servers (at least the "server grade" ones with ecc ram) are all now "un-metered 1 gbps". If you get/buy 10gbps uplink, there's a quota again 20TB included (which is lifted if you commit to paying 1 euro/pr TB over).

They basically increased the included bandwidth to the point where it was hard to hit the limits om 1gpbs uplink (although 1 gbps maxed out 24/7 is theoretically 10 TB/day 300/month).

"Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon. In this special case, we will charge the usage over 20TB with € 1.00/TB. (The basis for calculation is for outgoing traffic only. Incoming and internal traffic is not calculated.) There is no bandwidth limitation."

Can you post a link? I don't see the uplink addon on their wiki, and I'm a bit confused as to how there's no bandwidth limitation if there's a data cap (I guess they mean speed).

It's basically in all the "details" pages via the site menu > dedicated (and contrary to what I said, not limited to "enterprise"/ecc ram servers). See for example:

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex42-nvme

Ed: i think the implication is that you can just go ahead and use 300tb/month on a 1 gbps port if you can stand doing that... But that 3 000 TB/month on a 10gbps uplink is not included...

I did file a support ticket asking about this a month or so ago, they told me that there's really 1 Gbps guaranteed bandwidth and I could use 300 TB/mo. I didn't know about the update so I didn't ask, but I have just filed another issue asking about that.

I'll be honest, looking at those servers, I kind of want one of my projects to succeed (i.e. make more than $50/mo) so I can rent one of them.

This is because of 95th percentile spikes most likely.

> Hetzner gives me 3 TB of bandwidth per month, so I expect that to last me a long time.

Oh summer child... one meme going viral on reddit is going to destroy your hopes for the future...

Seriously though.

If an image gets to the front page of /r/all, it can easily get a million hits. That half megabyte image will consume half a terabyte of data transfer.

I don't know how much bandwidth gets CloudFlare to have a chat with me, but I'll cross that bridge when I get routed over it.

I am in the API example image and I do not like it. [1]

1: https://imgz.org/iJKuc6HA.png

I am sorry you feel this way. Maybe try having different emotions?

What if I need absolute surety my image(s) is not going to be subject to bit rot and not be available in a few years time? What if I do 'multi-posts' and share the same image across 10,000+ bulletin boards? Your bandwidth will run out very quickly if you saw the types of posting that I do (I use automation software to post to 10,000+ boards). And those posts last for decades. I am not sure I can rely on this service for my needs.

This is why I self-host my own image server and have it hooked up to a well-provisioned CDN for peace of mind. Then I have full control and can renew the domain for ten years each time to keep the images online.

If you needed such guarantees, I'd reckon you'd want to proxy through a domain name you control, anyways. I wouldn't trust the URL structure of a given image host to last decades, either. Or a given image host's hot-linking tolerance to stay the same.

Yeah, sounds like you need the "contact us" tier. I think your current solution is better for your needs.

Wow, never thought I'd meet ME in hackernews. This is exactly what I do. I have a domain with a few services running and upload everything to that, then get a hyperlink to it to embed/raw post everywhere.

In the Terms and Conditions[1]:

"It's mysterious and alluring, and maybe it slaps you a bit from time to time, but it doesn't really mean it, deep down you know it loves you and if only you weren't such an annoying user, it wouldn't have to do that."

This is a joke about physically abusive relationships. I found the rest of the irreverent tone funny, but then this made me sad.

[1] https://imgz.org/help/terms/

I found the rest of the irreverent tone funny too. I also found the joke that alludes to domestic violence funny.

Yes, I share your feelings. That's what I was going for, it's definitely not a "ha ha" sentence. I don't think it's offensive, I think it's a reminder of how this exists and if you're the victim, you have to stop blaming yourself and seek help.

What does the 1GB / 50 GB / 500 GB mean? Is that referring to storage capacity or bandwidth?

What if I use IMGZ to offload all the bandwidth-guzzling high-res images of my highly frequented website? Will IMGZ just serve up the image given a URL or also some stuff around it?

What if I have other large files that I'd like to offload. Just change the extension to PNG and I can host this on IMGZ?

I will refer you to the FAQ: https://imgz.org/help/faq/

Thanks. That answers the bandwidth question. How about the other two?

There is a 20 MB per file limit, so it doesn't work for very large files. Also, if your bandwidth starts becoming a problem, I guess I'll have a chat with you? I can't really say at this point.

I think this product is really cool - the copy is not for everyone but I think that's because it's a piece of art (no hyperbole intended) rather than just a business project. It clearly says something about the developer's perspective on the market and startups/tech businesses and that's the fun of it... to me at least.

Anyway, as much as I can appreciate that aspect and enjoy the fun of it, I just can't see myself using CLI for quick and simple image hosting. Especially if we're talking about things like meme sharing.

I definitely do see the market opportunity, to some extent that's why we launched Fast.io to make managing static asset hosting really simple and scaleable by syncing with your cloud storage so you can upload and manage content there.

I like it but I think you need a better way to upload images if you want to be a valid alternative to imgur.

Upvoting you so someone who can buy this out sees it and does so.

I will let you know. Good thing I made it so easy for potential buyers, huh? I don't know why more services don't do this, I mean, if you're going for a big exit, why not allow credit card payment?

Right? If your goal is a buyout, make sure to have a good sales funnel.

On another note, can I buy equity/get hired for equity only? I like your chances at a buyout, and I want in.

> Right? If your goal is a buyout, make sure to have a good sales funnel.

It seems so simple, yet nobody does it! Perplexing.

> On another note, can I buy equity/get hired for equity only? I like your chances at a buyout, and I want in.

Definitely not, buster! I'm keeping those sweet sweet shares. Unless you're a VC, in which case take all of them!

A no BS image host would:

1 - be free

2 - require no login or javascript

3 - give you direct links, without ads or tracking

This site fails at least the first two tests.

There used to be sites that passed all of these, and really were no BS image hosts. Sadly, I haven't seen one in many years.

Now pretty much all of them at least require logins or javascript.

Why "be free"? Why not "pay you"? I mean, where do you draw the line?

Because I'm a fan of the gift economy. This was the way the Internet used to be when it started. This is the spirit that's common in academia, but has sadly waned once the internet got commercialized and grew out of control.

In that case, please make a free host, I will be your most ardent supporter.

Academia is not free

They're still struggling to give away stuff that they've (somewhat implicitly) promised to give away, like their research.

Back in the days of the early internet it wasn't free to host images. You paid for a web host, had your own site, and hosted what you want. But you paid!

I didn't mean free to run your own image hosting site, but free to use.

Like Wikipedia. There are costs to run it, but it's free to use.

Same with public libraries.

I have a great way StavrosK can offer his image hosting for free, forever. pmoriarty if you would just pay all of StavrosK's hosting bills going forward we can all live in the promised land of free image hosting.

Now that is the gift economy at its finest!

Do you seriously believe in that? You have to be trolling.

"be free" is how we ended up with a dragnet surveillance that is plaguing the web. Who is going to pay for the storage and the bandwidth?

If you want it to "be free", you are free to host it on your own hardware.

> There used to be sites that passed all of these

> Sadly, I haven't seen one in many years.

Of course you won't see one: they're all dead or dying a slow death. Free is unsustainable.

It is sustainable.

Take a look at Wikipedia, archive.org, libraries, blogs, mailing lists, usenet, IRC, a huge variety of websites offering free tools, etc. The list goes on and on.

None of them need work on a surveillance model either. To participate in or contribute to surveillance is a personal choice, not something forced upon you when you make a service available to the internet for free.

Wikipedia and archive.org are supported by donations. That is possible for an image hosting site/service.

"blogs, mailing lists, usenet, IRC" are all paid by someone and all tho their are free hosts for them (or similar services), a lot of people are perfectly fine paying for them and otherwise seem mostly content "to participate in or contribute to surveillance". I'm fine with that too.

But it's very much always been "the way the Internet used to be" to pay for things you value sufficiently. Someone has always paid for everything and gift economies are inherently limited. They're also much harder now than when the Internet was younger.

Academia also seems like a poor example of 'the gift economy spirit'. They're struggling to live up to that spirit badly enough that it's disingenuous to suggest it as something to emulate.

I have 15 GB free on Google Drive and something similar on Microsoft OneDrive. Sharing files is as easy as dragging the file to a folder on my PC and right clicking to get a link that I can paste into email, IM, etc.

How is IMGZ better?

We launched a service recently (fast.io) that lets you publish that content from your OneDrive or Google Drive right to a CDN too. No storage limits, and 100GB a month of traffic. We aren't specific to image hosting, but if you want to host a meme on a CDN, it's similarly super easy.

Thanks. I'll look into that.

Now, this looks very interesting indeed. What would get me to throw money at this instantly would be an imgur passthrough; given the ID of an imgur album or image from my account, I would love to be able to pull it into imgz.org transparently. ie something like imgz.org/imgur/<id> which then redirects to the correct id afterwards.

Hmm, that's an interesting idea, I'll keep it in mind, thanks!

If bandwidth is the main concern, in my testing the AV1 format works in browsers already. You just put it as a single frame autoplay video.

Hypothetically could use WebAssembly to do encoding/decoding client side, and have the server just validate it. I'm not sure if there's a speedy av1 frame integrity tool yet or not.

Since it's a paid service, you should be more transparent about user privacy and security.

This is true. I hint to it in the terms, but I didn't want to break character too much. Basically, I take precautions for both, but it's a one-man side-project, so caveat emptor. Also, images are obviously public (though unlisted), so it's not meant for sensitive data storage.

"We have CDNs and Rust and all that fast crap."

https://gitlab.com/stavros/imgz/blob/master/main.rs

OK, then.

Technically correct; the best kind of correct.

I prefer postimages.org, it's even less shady or no-bullshit then this one.

A free image host doesn't give me much confidence in the guarantee of "image will not expire". Also, I don't like how me and my 10 images are on the same free tier as the guy abusing the service with 1,000,000s of images.

This is also my problem with Discord: no way to give them money as a server operator. So every time there's downtime or API issues, I think of the Discord servers I've been to where children are literally spamming a channel as fast as they can and I get annoyed that there's no way for me to get a better, paid tier for my server where we're trying to do some serious work.

Having no business model or hiding it from the user (I didn't see a /pricing page) does not seem like "no bullshit" to me. It just reeks of borrowed time, ephemeral weekendware, or VC funding.

You should care about your images and that's all. You have no need to worry about the guy abusing the service with his 1M images, that's the owner of said service problem. As for confidence in service I can tell you I use it for at least 5 years and still can access those images. For a free service I'd say is quite good. I don't have earlier images since I discovered the site only 5 years ago so I can't speak for higher image retention time.

> that's the owner of said service problem

Thus, at least indirectly, it's a potential problem for every user or customer of said owner's service.

This definitely already happened 100%, I bet meanwhile the owner(s) of postimages.org dealt with and they still up. So I worry about my images and that's it.

Love how buying the site only gets you 1GB hosting. Hope this works out.

Thank you, tell your rich friends!

Nice. Imgur is dead now that it requires login for every image it perceives to be 'explicit' (as if its goal is to protect the children rather than harvest their data)

I'm interested in buying the site, but I don't want to pay $999,999.98 per year. That sounds like renting. Shouldn't it be a one-time thing?

You need to buy a year to show good faith, then we'll talk.

Neat.

Question: Can I get a tarball or some other dump of customer data? (Well, I can't, not being a customer yet. But if we overlook that detail.)

Your data or all the data? Yours, no. Everyone's, it's crazy enough that it JUST MIGHT WORK

Okay now you can get yours too. It's just images.

Yes, mine. Even if I upload from my phone I'd want to back every image up to my NAS, see?

I guess I'll sign up next time I would have uploaded to Imgur. Thanks.

Hmm, I should actually make it even better and add an RSS feed to your own images, or you can use the API to list the latest ones and download the ones you're missing (no need to keep redownloading everything every time).

rclone endpoint!!!

That might be a bit too involved :P

That's starting to sound awfully close to what a social network would do, mister. ʘ‿ʘ

HEY! You shut your filthy mouth!

Also these would be authenticated, nobody should be able to discover which images you have uploaded. The RSS feed and API listing would be for you only.

I like this initiative. Best of luck !

PS : I guess there is a typo in the pricing options, the most expensive should offer 1TB instead of 1GB

Oh no, that's no typo (hence the "What do you care?") below.

This is great. I think I am going to integrate into Hubski, and pay for our users. I hope you stick around.

Imgur is awful.

Please send me an email beforehand if you're going to integrate somewhere, so I can be ready for any potential influx. I might also be able to give you a discount, depending on the volume!

Cool. Will do. We are a quiet bunch, so it should be modest.

Hah, domain brothers! (I own imgy .org)

I enjoy how your DMCA link is just for show.

Hah. Erm.. not sure how that’s broken it’s just a page with a form on it..

Yeah the site it redirects to needs a fair share of love. Honestly might shutter it if OP’s site works well for me, I too just wanted a place to bung images that wasn’t imgur

FOR LIFE

Did you talk to NCMEC pre-launch about strategies for matching uploaded images against a blacklist?

I did not, but I will if this picks up.

@the developer Consider implementing Coil.com as an alternative way to pay for non-frequent users.

How you know it’s no bullshit? Last time I heard everybody claim their own shit as no bullshit :)

I am not interested in seeing the rise of yet another image host that is not a nonprofit

I love the website and that you do not take yourself too seriously. Kudos to you!

And I love you.

Finally some honest marketing.

feedback: overall i like what you're building.

I like that you've put personality into the marketing material, but i think you've pushed that a bit too far. It feels hostile towards other services. While i don't disagree with your logic I _also_ don't like tying myself to hostile feeling services, even if the hostility isn't directed at me.

To me the "because I'm a great guy" feels self aggrandizing and egotistical instead of funny.

[edit] and yup, i agree with another poster about the commentary on the money page being a total turn-off.

I'm VERY happy to pay for good services with a sustainable business model. The "personality" on this site has completely turned me off and made me not only not want to have anything to do with it, but also to be sure to not support future sites from the same creator.

I do agree with you, there's nothing about a bland, milquetoast site that offends. Unfortunately, there's nothing that stands out either.

I wanted to make a site that didn't take itself seriously. If it was going to get some attention, it would have to also do something, and an image host was as good as any. It's too bad that you don't like my site, but the entire point is that it's not bland. Some people get a kick out of it, even though others dislike it.

Seems that your IP is blocked in Russia. Had to use VPN to check your site out.

Do you support CNAMEing so I can use a joke domain I own for image hosting?

Depends on how good a joke domain it is.

I would like to know deeper how much shady are shady alternatives

I'm talking about things like Imgur, which now won't even let you upload images on mobile web (I assume their mobile app does), and instead insists you "make a post" for their reddit-style social network thing.

There are some other free alternatives, but they aren't very reliable, and it's generally been a bit frustrating because the elephant in the room is that image hosting doesn't make money unless the user pays. So, I figured I might as well address it head-on.

Imgur really jumped the shark by doubling down on social features. Image hosting has seen a lot of players come and go. It’s a simple service complicated by business.

The Craigslist model comes to mind. Looks the same, works the same, and cheap to run compared to their traffic volumes.

https://www.developerfusion.com/media/76730/how-craigslist-w...

> Imgur really jumped the shark by doubling down on social features.

I don't know if you can blame them (then again, that hasn't stopped my IMGZ character from doing it), nobody's going to pay to upload memes and they have to make money somehow, and social was one alternative. There aren't many ways to monetize serving an image...

If you want to talk about Imgur.com being shady, they make their mobile site slower on purpose than the desktop site... combined with multiple "download our app for a faster experience" ad plastered on it...

Yeah, I hate that :( Reddit does the same, plus their image service is just terrible.

> Imgur, which now won't even let you upload images on mobile web

They hide the upload from the mobile views but if you go directly to https://imgur.com/upload you can upload from there even on mobile.

I agree that Imgur has become quite terrible though, and I think it’s a consequence of offering the service for free as they do. They have a lot of users and serve a lot of traffic, and they need to cover their bills and make a living somehow.

I hope to see your paid service thrive and be able to offer a good service and user experience to those of us who are willing to pay. I think your service has a good chance of being able to succeed.

When you choose a "private" post it mirrors the old functionality of imgur.

Select "view desktop site" and you can still upload images on mobile.

<side rant>Personally I can't stand mobile versions of pages, anyway. I use "view desktop version" for everything, and pan and zoom as needed</side rant>

The second alternative non-shady financial model for image/video hosting is relying on donations, eg. https://catbox.moe/ . The site currently receives $322/month on patreon.

I love ur tone jajajaj Won’t subscrive tho, but I love you!

Yo te amo tambien <3

This is really funny, I like this. This is so cool.

How do I browse submitted images? If it’s just for personal images why wouldn’t I just throw them up on S3?

Immense friction.

Also you probably don't want every image you want to share on the internet coming from the same S3 bucket. And you don't want to pay S3/Cloudfront pricing so you'll probably want to put Cloudflare in front of it. Etc, etc.

Why? Just use GUIDs.

I'm guessing you're thinking about discoverablity? I think the comment to which you were replying was pointing out that you might want to serve different images out of different buckets (e.g. because they have different audiences) or use a different bucket for images versus other content.

But if you're happy with just using whatever S3 bucket you have, then there's no reason to switch.

What does the audience have to do with anything? Why are you mixing application layer concerns with data storage concerns? It’s like saying you want images for one audience served from Azure but another audience served from AWS. It makes no difference, it’s all just data and bits stored somewhere and served out. Might as well just put it all in the same place. Could easily be the same bucket.

> why wouldn’t I just throw them up on S3?

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

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