2024: Stressed out Phoenix

Hello 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.