I’m not sure if anyone really asked this question, but it’s one I’ve been asking myself lately (in the past few weeks). The answer is yes, if I can find the motivation to work on a complete rewrite and major improvement of the site scripts (that is unfortunately kind of a big “if”).

However if I were to revive the site it will have some major changes. First, user registration will probably be mandatory to be able to easily combat abuse (like spam etc). Second, hotlinking may be limited to websites in European languages (English, German, French, etc) to encourage visitors from those areas and discourage visitors from certain other areas (such as China), which should hopefully help make the site profitable.

Other features I’m thinking about are URL shortening by default: I recently acquired the ih.nu domain for this purpose (even though I’m not even sure yet if and when the site will be back) and to allow easy upload of multiple files using a Flash plugin (SWFUpload).

But anyway, I’m usually very slow when it comes to completing such grand plans like these, so don’t hold your breath

The text on the main page of the site is short and somewhat vague about the reason site was closed. First the bit about why the site “needs a lot of improvement” if I were to open it again. When I closed the site it was still using the same scripts (with relatively minor improvements and no big rewrites) that I wrote in 2007. These scripts in themselves are only a simple rewrite of the previous version of the site (from 2004).

The scripts lack a ton of features (such as user registration, user-deletable files, etc) but also had some serious flaws. For example when you uploaded an image, the script would randomly (really: using the rand() function) pick an image server to store the image on. If anything went wrong with moving the image to the image server, the upload would fail. So if the image server was down or overloaded, a good chunk of all uploads would fail. Ouch

Now such problems can be overcome  by simply fixing the scripts. Except that (as I wrote in the message on the main page) I couldn’t find the motivation to do so. Therefore I figured it would be better to just pull the plug (for new uploads).

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Okay, that’s not really a question. But  I did receive a few offers of help to host the site. That’s very nice, but unfortunately not quite easily done. All images currently occupy about 3 terabyte of disk storage. And because of the type of site ImageHost.org is, you’d need really fast drives too (or loads of RAM to cache the most popular files). The site also still uses about 200 megabit of traffic on average (and up to 300 megabit at peak times). To put that in different terms: that’s about 75 terabyte of data transfer per month.

If you add that all up, you need one heck of a big server with fast & large drives, loads of RAM (for file cache) and a gigabit connection minimum. So if you have one of those servers lying around, sure, but I don’t think most people have

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Short answer: No.

After closing the site I’ve received numerous inquiries regarding such things as whether the site is for sale or people who wanted to help hosting it. For this reason I’ve revived the blog. It went down somewhere in 2010 after some server changes and since there wasn’t very interesting anyway I didn’t make much effort to restore it from backups somewhere else. Anyway I’ll try to address the questions I’ve received in the upcoming posts.

It occurred to me that frequent ImageHost.org users shouldn’t be forced to enter the captcha with every upload. One of the aspects of the spam attack was that each image was uploaded by a “new” user who had not yet uploaded anything prior. The script now basically only displays a captcha if it detects you haven’t uploaded anything before.

Hopefully this makes the captcha now a lot less annoying, as you basically only have to enter it once or twice (except when you delete cookies and/or use another PC).

You may have noticed you need to enter a captcha now to upload any files. This was unfortunately made necessary by spam bots which managed to upload many thousands of spam images (for use in spam email). To prevent such spam bots from uploading again I’ve added the captcha.

Unfortunately detecting the difference between a spammer and a normal user isn’t easy. The spam bots use randomized IPs (presumably hacked PCs from a botnet), randomized images (contents, width, height, filesize) and carefully circumvented my previous measures against automated uploading by making it look like a real user had visited the site and uploaded an image.

I know the captcha has issues – especially if your native language isn’t English or even a western language (such as Chinese), but it was the best solution I could come up with in short notice. If anyone has any ideas for a better way to prevent spam bots from abusing the site I’d be grateful!

Again it’s been to long since my last blog update. But on to the good news. A new server (j.imagehost.org) is now online and taking all new uploads. The great thing about this new server is it’s bandwidth: it’s the first ImageHost.org server with a gigabit link capable of speeds of up to 100 megabyte per second. The existing servers only have 100 megabit connections (10 megabyte/sec) whose limit was easily reached during peak times. Essentially this means ImageHost.org has now a lot more room to grow… for a few months (heh).

The other good news is that I’m finally working on a new version of the site that’ll incorporate many of things that have been requested in the past. As an experiment the new version of the site will initially run on a different domain name with slightly different upload rules. But if it works alright it’ll be implemented on ImageHost.org as well. The new version will have a convenient multi-upload form with progress bar, delete links, automatic (public) galleries and (optional) user registration to manage your images. With any luck the experimental test site will go live in April 2010.

Whew, it’s been a long time since the last post to this blog – way to long. As a result there is a ton I could write about, such as the new server that went operational last month. The most important change at the moment however is that some anti-abuse measures were implemented today that may affect your usage of the site.

This weekend ImageHost.org was hit by a spam attack, whereby a spammer used automated scripts to uploaded thousands of images to use in spam emails. I had hoped this kind of abuse was a thing of the past, as while the site got hit a few times by such attacks in 2004, this is the first time this happened since the relaunch in late 2007.

To avoid such attacks in the future several measures have been taken to make it significantly harder for automated scripts to upload images. To avoid being hit by these as a legitimate user, make sure you have cookies enabled and allow cookies for the imagehost.org domain. Most browsers should be configured this way by default. Second, make sure you always use the main www.imagehost.org site to upload new images.

If you follow these two guidelines, you should not notice a thing from these new measures and you can use the site as usual.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but there will be some more downtime on the main server (that hosts a, b, c, d, & g.imagehost.org) as the main drive (on which the OS resides) needs to be replaced. For this reason unfortunately the server will be offline for several hours while backups are made, the drive is replaced, the OS reinstalled & reconfigured.

Uploads and recently uploaded images (which are stored on f.imagehost.org) should be unaffected and continue to work as normal.

Update: the server OS was reinstalled, but it was the wrong version (as the server has loads of RAM, installing a 32-bit OS doesn’t make sense). Unfortunately this is going to delay things some further.

Update 2: Done! While there are still lots of little things (mostly cron jobs) left to set up, the server is hosting files again! Actually once the server came back online (hours ago) I had already hacked up a quick fix to have the other (working) server host the affected files, but this kind of overloaded that server a lot. I figured it was better to have the images load slowly than not at all. But from this moment on speeds should improve as the original server is now taking over the job again.