Fornax
patreon
2024: Stressed out Phoenix
🕑 Added 2024-12-31 14:36:19 +0000 UTCHello lovely Patrons. Another year has passed, and it's time for another recap. Check out last year's recap as well. Once again a lot has happened this year. It was a busy (and pretty stressful) time for me.
Last year this graph looked like the start of an exponential growth phase. This time it looks like the second half of an Sigmoid curve. Of course, all exponential growth ends up as an S curve in the end. Everything that starts must end. I'm not stopping anytime soon though.
Financially, pixeldrain has done quite well this year. For the last half year I have been able to pay myself a salary, which is a new development. Imagine that, actually earning money for the work you do.
Statistics!
Now, here are the stats you all (or some of you, at least) have been waiting for!
The number of Patreon supporters increased from 6723 to 13042 (94% increase)
Monthly earnings through Patreon increased from €20614 to €41672 (102% increase)
Last year in September I integrated with Mollie for prepaid payments. That earned €16376 in those last three months. This year it earned €112783, of which 75% was through Paypal, 15% credit/debit cards and 10% regional providers
610 700 TB of bandwidth was used (122% increase)
2 180 735 899 files were viewed through the website (312% increase)
2 319 845 611 files were downloaded (236% increase)
Bandwidth capacity was upgraded from 400 Gbps to 900 Gbps (125%. It takes 9 seconds to download a terabyte of data at this rate)
Storage capacity was upgraded from 5272 TB to 11232 TB (113% increase). There is a bit of a story behind this.. keep reading
I have committed 233 changes to the pixeldrain server repository, written 14964 lines of code, and deleted 8846 lines of code
And as always, the global stats:
3 639 558 879 file views
3 886 184 143 file downloads
984 500 TB bandwidth used (one hair removed from 1 EB!)
(Daily bandwidth usage in the last 5 years)
Some interesting things happened this year. I don't blog that often (don't really enjoy writing), but for some momentous occasions I make a little announcement post. Here are the highlights of this year:
We started the year with... overloaded servers, and believe it or not, we're ending the year with overloaded servers as well. I simply can't order servers quick enough to keep up with the growth.
Then, two weeks later, we launched our Discord community! It has been fairly quiet in the channels, but we have our moments. I use it to make small development announcements as well, so if you're curious, be sure to join.
In February.. directories! I have been teasing this feature for two years, and it's finally available. The pixeldrain filesystem comes with FTP and rclone support.
I also increased transfer limits and file expiry time for all Patreon plans and rolled out the pixeldrain speedtest for debugging download issues.
In March I expanded pixeldrain with a datacenter location in Tokyo hosted by FDCServers........
In July my hosting provider FDCServers terminated my account because they disagreed with the way pixeldrain handles abuse reports (for reference, all abuse reports sent to pixeldrain are processed within one or two working days). This could have been pretty bad, I had one month to find a hosting provider capable of serving 600 Gbps traffic. This is where my Discord server saved the day. Due to my stressed out rants in #general, my buddy at FileDitch came through with a hosting provider he knew well. The new provider, GSL Networks, offered to host all of pixeldrain at the same price as FDC, with a much better network and support. In the end pixeldrain came out of this ordeal much stronger than before.
In July I also released the account dashboard. This is probably biggest visual change to the site this year. I'm still proud of how it turned out.
In September rclone 1.68 was released which includes full support for the pixeldrain filesystem! You can use this to mount pixeldrain as a network drive and use it as a storage expansion or backup destination.
Involuntary traditions
At the end of September I went on a vacation to Japan with some friends. Vacation is usually where things go south for me, it has become a bit of a running joke that every time I go on vacation all I do is curse at my laptop because something outside of my control has completely gone to shit and I have to fix it ASAP. But this time I was confident, pixeldrain has been running well this year, no major outages.
But apparently my confidence was misplaced. Shortly after landing in Japan, the hosting provider Hetzner, which hosted all 130 of pixeldrain's storage servers, decided to terminate my account too. No reason specified, I never managed to get it out of them. Once again I was back to stressed out rants in #general. This situation was much more severe than last time with FDC, because FDC did not host any customer data, it was just caches. When the caches go down nobody can download anything, but the files are still there. I can just install new caches and carry on. No, this time ALL THE FILES were on the line. 10 PB of customer data could disappear in a matter of days. This would be the end of pixeldrain.
Even seeing this photo gets my heart pounding. Just let me soak in the Onsen, damn it.
I turned to GSL Networks again. They promised they could do it, but not within the deadline Hetzner provided. Even copying that much data over the internet would take three weeks. They were going to call around to their hardware provider to see who could do it the fastest. Meanwhile it was up to me to convince Hetzner to stall the account termination.
The original deadline was the last day of October, about three weeks after the termination notice. With some back and forth mailing I convinced them to move it to the end of November, that would still be quite tight, but possible.
GSL had found suitable hardware and rackspace in Frankfurt, but they did not have enough budget to order all of it. After some calls we ended on a pre-payment of €130000 which would be enough to get all the hardware ordered (all the money on the pixeldrain bank account at the time).
In the end the storage servers were deployed on 12 November, and (just) before the end of the month the data transfer was complete. Shortly before the deadline, Hetzner conceded to extend the termination until the end of December. I just finished migrating the last stuff I host at Hetzner (local community websites, game servers, development and testing servers). In about eight hours my Hetzner account, where I loyally purchased all the computing power I ever needed for six years, will get terminated. Another saga ended. If you want to know more about the Hetzner ordeal, in a week or two I'll be posting a detailed timeline of the whole event.
Fresh start
2024 was a tough time for pixeldrain. Not all of it was fun and I honestly feel pretty burnt out. I'm sure my motivation will recover, but I need some distraction. I was able to buy a house this year to which I got the keys a few weeks back. For the coming months I'm going to put my efforts into turning my concrete box into a nice place to be.
Pffffffffffff. I'm sure 2025 will be great. Have a nice new year's eve.
Greetings,
Wim.
Comments
Fornax
What's the problem? Do you get an error message?
jeff
can't login pixeldrain
Fornax
I have been working on something new in the background. But I have not much to write about. Soon you'll get the next yearly recap
Daryl D. Vorpahl
Have you done any recent updates? Why should I keep a membership with your site?
Fornax
Thanks for your support. I wrote a draft blog post about the Hetzner ordeal when it was happening, but after I got it solved my mind shifted to other issues and I kinda forgot about it. I'll have to finish the draft sometime and publish it here.
HentaiLord
Fucking hell, that was a hell of a story, the hetzner ordeal. Kinda wanna know what went down, so I will be waiting for your post. Anyways, I've been a super long time supporter of pixeldrain and will continue to be. All the best! Fornax. Your 2025 will end with a bang, not a bad one but a glorious one!
Lexus
Is something going on with the servers now? Most D/L are taking several hours as opposed to 20 mins on free mirror sites,been that way several days now. If you finally decided to give up on running the service the least you could do is let us know here.
Stefan t
I've been waiting for my premium for 2-4 days, it was really good, now it's just shit, I want my money back 🤮🤮🤮🤮💩💩💩💩
Fornax
Here: https://pixeldrain.com/user/subscription
Leander Lesotho
I just bought pro and want to watch one piece but it said something about link to patreon where do I do that
Fornax
That means your internet provider is blocking the site. Try using a different DNS server like https://one.one.one.one
Kaz X Doujin
I tried three Browsers to link the Page and always get „Page not found error“. Thus I unsubscribed, now I can’t even access any Member stuff here either even though I paid for it.
Fornax
If you only enter your e-mail address in the login form you will get a recovery link.
Casa Nova
I have been using pixeldrain for over 2 years and mine I can not log in nor I can`t find any option to recover password whats going on ?
nikolas giovazzi
happened the same to me, can yall fix this? i paid for the service
Jim
Why does it say my account is free when I purchase a monthly membership. What's going on? If it doesn't work by tomorrow I will request a refund back, and yes I already link my account as it says to do once purchasing a membership.
SaotomeChan
Fornax something is happening => It hasn't connected: Possible security problem; when i try enter in webpage of pixeldrain.
b4D8oY
Send to Discord and to no reply !
Pavla Derevlanyjová
Dobrý den omlouvám se že píši sem ale mám problém již jsem ho jednou řešila pak byl klid a teď znova nevím si s tím rady.Tento server by měl jít spojit z Pixeldrain ale i po opětovném souhlasu že se mohou spojit mi to nefunguje moc prosím o radu jak na to děkuji moc.Přeji pěkný den Pavla.
Fornax
People, this is not a support forum. Please head to Discord or send me a private message when you need help.
Fornax
What is going on here?
msfrm499 Mm23Mm
Paypal Money USD 5 No 💔🤬🫵🏻🤬🤬💔💔👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻👎🏻🤬🤬💔💔💔💔🫵🏻🫵🏻🫵🏻🫵🏻
juleyano
6 months ago, the payment was made and until now the account has not been activated. I sent 5 emails and each time it tells me how to log in, but to no avail. I hope to get the money back. Thank you. You were much better the first year than this year.
Luciano Manuel Montenegro
Well again the same problem, I can't download at more that 1mbps while being a paid member, this issue it's going on for a year and nobody answers to this, I'm done with this, other sites are more cheap and work fine without so many issues. It's sad, but it is what it is.
xavi30
Me acabo de suscribir a un plan y ahora que tengo que esperar
Jared
el servicio es una mierda no contestan en discord varias personas se quejan de que no pueden subir archvos y solo lo ignora,basura total sale mejor usar otras opciones.
Luciano Yav
Hey can I ask you something? Can you make a crack version of quad remediëren for blender cause the one the site doesnt works
prelawchannel
Why does wano say it’s in dub but isn’t?
Froid
Hey! pixeldrain is not recognizing my email so i cant login to my pro account. Can you help?
prelawchannel
question, why is enies lobby-postwar all not dubbed
Tobias Carlander
Love Pixledrain, but its a pain needing to use vpn from Italy, do you have any workaround or are you working to get unblocked?
Txema
My Jdowloaded API key is not working, I have renewed it and there is no way.
Liew
Happy new year! Looks like things are going well for you. I hope your file sharing service prosper as more features are being developed.
Clorox Box
Thank Fornax. Thank for everything.
InOnesGraveDed
Happy new year! And thank you for your hard work <3
Safe Pirates
This story wins my heart, thanks for you struggle
RogueRat
Still having to run VPN to get around USA BW-throttling - but heck - VPN is always a good idea anyway - CONGRATZ on the Salary, Well Deserved!
Fornax
Me too
Simon Kompe
Welp let's hope the vacation next year goes better fingers crossed.
SHREDDER1876
Happy New Year Fornax :-)
Damian Smaga
Thanks for your hardwork bro♥️
GooseElite
Thanks for all the hard work and Happy new year.
francesca
thank you for all the hard work! <3
Fornax
I read about that as well. Hetzner used to be good, but it's going down hill quickly. I'd stay away. Unfortunately there are few good alternatives in Europe. I have been looking for a place to host some VPS servers, but everything is so terribly overpriced compared to Hetzner.
Lawrence
hetzner also closed kiwix's account without warning around November (per kiwix). Now they've closed pixeldrain's account without any basis either Can we still trust hetzner?
ChrisU
Mooi werk Wim.
