Postimage.org - DEAD END

Y

yigido

Thread author
Postimage.org is in danger and needs your help

Please contact us if you have a CDN that is capable and willing of serving 1.8 Petabytes of outgoing traffic per month free of charge, or if you can make a donation to help us pay a monthly $12,000 bill from CloudFlare that we are now facing.

As of this moment, Postimage.org faces not a mere technical problem, but an existential threat.

What's happening?
On October 27, 2016, CloudFlare abruptly cut us off from most of their services except DNS for abusing their system. This came as a bit of a surprise, since although we've been using one of their cheapest plans for a long time, we had reached an agreement earlier this month that we would be upgrading our account when the next billing cycle started. A couple of Skype calls later we learned the following:
  • CloudFlare was very unhappy that the total traffic usage of our project had surpassed a staggering figure of 1.8 petabytes in the last 30 days.
  • The amount of money we had to pay monthly to make them happy again grew after each Skype call as more people in CF got involved in examining our case: $200 became $1000, which in turn became $12k.
  • The sales team was adamant that although CloudFlare did not officially have bandwidth limits, our violation of Section 10 of their terms of service could not be remedied by serving less image traffic and more HTML traffic (although, being an image hosting company, we have no idea how we would pull this one off anyway without blatantly gaming the system), and that at the level of petabytes of data, they would never allow that on a $200/month Business plan.
  • We were officially screwed.
Let us make this absolutely clear: we do not hold a grudge against CloudFlare for refusing to foot our traffic bill any further. We do realize that we are costing them a ton of money, and it is solely our own fault that our current business model is not sustainable. We also recognize that the deal they offered is probably as good as anything we could reasonably expect from other CDN providers. The only thing we disagree with is that instead of publishing estimates of how much traffic customers are actually allowed to consume at each service plan, CloudFlare insists that their bandwidth is unlimited and declines to comment on the actual terms of service.

What should we do now?
The most likely outcome is that Postimage.org will have to shut down, terminating nearly 140 million images embedded into some 450 thousand websites, first and foremost a number of great message boards (although a lot of online auctions, personal galleries and corporate websites will be affected as well).

While we are definitely bothered that the project on which our modest livelihood depends is shutting down, this latter circumstance bothers us much more. We will hopefully find other jobs to pay our bills, but a huge historical layer spanning more than a decade of some of the Internet's most vibrant communities will be obliterated forever. Thus, at this point failure is not an option; we must fight tooth and nail to keep Postimage.org running.

Where's the money?
Historically, advertising revenue has been our main source of income [approximately a 50/50 split between AdSense and content recommendation systems]. While we've recently decided to experiment with header bidding platforms, we have yet to collect a single dollar from these experiments, so we don't really know if this will work.

We are also considering the option of running a crowdfunding effort a la Reddit Gold or a donation system. Our main website is seeing 8 million unique users per month, and if just 0.125% of our userbase sent us $1 every month, that would be enough to cover our traffic bills and stay with CloudFlare.

Finally, there is an option to try a different role in the digital marketing industry, perhaps even become a DMP data source as well as a publisher (our recent measurements indicate that we're serving over 28 million unique daily users over our whole network of 450k websites). However, we have to first answer a couple of important questions such as if this data is actually worth anything, and if such a privacy-impairing tradeoff would be acceptable for our users if that's what it took to keep their images online.

P.S. If you have any suggestions or bright ideas, please contact us at admin@postimage.org.
 
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Y

yigido

Thread author
I am not able to see my old screenshots which I made them with Postimage's simple uploader tool.
I came to their websites and it seems they are having a problem with money :(
I loved the service but it seems dying.. this is sad I lost all my pictures on many websites..I am going to lost them..
 
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W

Wave

Thread author
This isn't good at all... Damn. :(

I'm not so much sad about the actual service potentially having to shut-down but more of the fact that there are people who spent a long time working on Postimage.org and now they may be out of a job and may struggle to get another one which will be sufficient enough to pay their bills.

Clearly the people who develop/maintain this service love their jobs, and there's nothing worse than losing a job which pays your bills, at the same time as it being a job that you love... :(

For example, imagine if a company like Emsisoft or Avast unexpectedly shut-down for whatever reason(s). You would feel sad about the people who would be losing their jobs (especially after the countless years of long history of the company) for sure. Imagine if it was you.
 

Ink

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Well-known
Jan 8, 2011
22,361
"Please contact us if you have a CDN that is capable and willing of serving 1.8 Petabytes of outgoing traffic per month free of charge, or if you can make a donation to help us pay a monthly $12,000 bill from CloudFlare that we are now facing."

They admitted it's their fault, the requests above sound like they're asking too much. o_O
 
Y

yigido

Thread author
They keep all images for free for lifetime. There is no time limit for their services to use images. It is great for users but it is bad for them.
I think they should remove the images from unregistered users. So they will gain some traffic..I am not expert on this.. This status effecting me because I am user of them for a long time.. I lost all my images now!
 
W

Wave

Thread author
They keep all images for free for lifetime. There is no time limit for their services to use images. It is great for users but it is bad for them.
I think they should remove the images from unregistered users. So they will gain some traffic..I am not expert on this.. This status effecting me because I am user of them for a long time.. I lost all my images now!
Surely as their service becomes more and more used over time, they will be using far more data (outgoing) than 1.8 petabytes, which means they will surely need more money to afford the service in the long run. Clearly, their service strategy isn't working out and they need to come up with better methods for generation of money to support their project, or they need to hope that people donate at least $1 a month...

But I agree, it is great for users and bad for them, and it's bad about people losing images. Because unless you have all these images saved somewhere to re-upload, what will you do? :(

I am not sure how this works either. hmm....
 

SHvFl

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If you can't keep afloat means business is failing and you need to let it die. I never heard of this site but i can't see a single word with data on how they plan on keeping the site working in the future. Sure someone gives them 12k, so what. Each month they will ask someone to pay the bill for their failing site or magically their ideas will provide the exact money they need?
What i see is that they tried to earn more money from other ways of advertising without figuring out what that will bring them and when and let everything on luck. Which proves they have 0 business sense and they should not be trusted with money.
Also who expects to use 1.8PB per month and pay 200$?
 
Y

yigido

Thread author
Surely as their service becomes more and more used over time, they will be using far more data (outgoing) than 1.8 petabytes, which means they will surely need more money to afford the service in the long run. Clearly, their service strategy isn't working out and they need to come up with better methods for generation of money to support their project, or they need to hope that people donate at least $1 a month...

But I agree, it is great for users and bad for them, and it's bad about people losing images. Because unless you have all these images saved somewhere to re-upload, what will you do? :(

I am not sure how this works either. hmm....
I cannot even reach my images on postimage to re-upload or download them :(
 

_CyberGhosT_

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@yigido :rolleyes:
PostImage is working just fine, I use them myself and have for years.
PI_SS.png
 

_CyberGhosT_

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Y

yigido

Thread author
Why not create an account at the time ?,
you put your stuff there for free and can't give them the courtesy of creating an account ?
Well I bet they purged all the non account holders to trim the data, I don't blame them.
Thats not their fault ;)
Yes, it is my fault to use this service ;) to save their users with account, they will maybe delete free images.
No problem for me, I just hate broken images on articles and websites..
 

_CyberGhosT_

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Yes, it is my fault to use this service ;) to save their users with account, they will maybe delete free images.
No problem for me, I just hate broken images on articles and websites..
I would just create an account, I will donate to help them they are an awesome service. This error just seems like an oversight on
their part.
They are good and reliable. One evening I was having issues getting my images to show here at MT and Jack was helping me, I messaged PostImage support and within 10min they had replied and helped me. You don't get that fast a turnaround from paid services most times.
I am staying with PostImage, the rest of the account holders will see PostImage's Value, I bet a dollar to a dime they will be fine.
 
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NikolayfromRussia

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Jul 3, 2014
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It is really bad news for our forum because many images are stored on PostImage servers. And I am afaid all of them will gone if they close their service. Hower, some important stuff stored on our hosting provider' servers. Too many bad news in last time. As says English proverb ,,misfortune never comes alone,, :eek: :)
 

_CyberGhosT_

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I think they remove the SSL certificate from their site,
I got "invalid certificate" alerts from my old links
Screenshot
..
I think they decided to end!
Whats wrong with you ?
the site is not down they did not "end it" I told you that this morning, what ever trouble your having is on your end not the site.
It is up and I can sign in just fine.
Here look:
PostImage.png
You don't have to like them, but don't spread misinformation, people rely on us and our info needs to be correct not misleading, some one could read your post and act off of bad intel. ;)
They have nearly all the money now too so all will be back to normal for account holders in a day or two.
 
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_CyberGhosT_

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Yes, and that 900$ happened very fast, in less than a day, plus the money they had before setting up that
donation fund, two or three days from now and all will be fine.
 
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