2023: The year that pixeldrain became a business

Hi people. The end of the year is nigh and I wanted to do another little recap like I did last year.

I was just looking through the old post and, oh my, a lot has changed. This year has been crazy.

First of all, I quit my job this year. Pixeldrain used to be my little pet project that I worked on in the evenings, but in the summer of this year the subscriptions really started to pick up steam and I could tell that it wouldn't be long until I could support myself with it. So in September I told my boss  'See ya later, alligator', and filed for divorce. Business has been good since then. I can work my own hours, which I honestly might be abusing a bit to play a little too much Runescape, but I'm still making great progress growing the platform.

With that out of the way, here are the numbers you might have been waiting for, maybe:

• The number of Patreon supporters increased from 1341 to 6723 (101% increase)

• Monthly earnings through Patreon increased from €3041 to €20614 (577% increase)

• I also integrated with Mollie in September (and through Mollie, PayPal). This has led to €16376 in Prepaid deposits

• 274 970 terabytes of bandwidth was used (275 Petabytes! 406% increase)

• 529 939 694 files were viewed through the website (423% increase)

• 689 796 592 files were downloaded (477% increase)

• Bandwidth capacity was upgraded from 50 Gbps to 400 Gbps (That's 50 gigabytes per second! It takes 20 seconds to download a terabyte at this speed)

• Storage capacity was increased from 724 TB to... 5272 TB (628% increase)

• I have made 199 commits to the pixeldrain server repository, added 11856 lines of code and removed 10990 lines of code

You might also be interested in some global statistics. Since I started tracking the stats pixeldrain has served...

• 1 455 396 890 file views

• 1 554 120 843 downloads

• and used 371.7 PB of bandwidth

Wow. Those are some large numbers. Needless to say I spent a lot of time configuring servers this year. Speaking of servers, when reading those monetary units you might assume that I am rolling in the dough right now, but those servers are EXPENSIVE! Still, about 80% of all that money goes to hosting.

Last year I said that I wanted to release a cloud drive feature... That's still the case, but I didn't manage to release it this year. The feature works right now, but there is some preparation work that I need to do before launch so I can be sure that it will work smoothly for everyone.

Have a great new year's eve. Take care of your appendages. See you in the next one!

Greetings,

Wim.