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.

Unfortunately at the moment the other server (not the same one as yesterday) is currently down. I was doing some small software upgrades, including a kernel upgrade which required a reboot. Unfortunately the server is currently stuck doing “fsck” (Linux equivalent of Scan Disk or chkdsk) and it looks like it may take a bit longer before it’s done. Again I apologize for the inconvenience.

Update: unfortunately it looks like the system drive of the server will need to be replaced. This means even more down time unfortunately, as it’s going to take some time to get the OS reconfigured again after my provider reinstalls it. No data should be lost however as the drive isn’t completely gone (plus there are backups on other servers). In the mean while I’m going to try to get the main site back online first, using the server that is currently working.

Update 2: seems like when my provider mentioned a reinstall was necessary, they didn’t meant it needed to be done right away and that the system wasn’t booting – it is. So for a short while all of ImageHost.org should be online (pretty much) until the drive will be replaced in a few hours (after which a, b, c, d & g.imagehost.org will be temporary offline until the OS is reconfigured).

The second ImageHost.org server, which hosts e.imagehost.org and f.imagehost.org was down for most of the day unfortunately. Part of the reason it took so long was because I didn’t notice until in the afternoon, and another reason is that it took some time to fix: it appears the network card had died. Anyway, the server is now back up. I apologize for the inconvinience.

The ability to hotlink to images is an important part of ImageHost.org. However some users have been abusing this feature by hotlinking to large full size images from very active message boards. For this reason I’ve tweaked the hotlinking rules to discourage this practice. Any image you want to hotlink to now needs to be less than 250 KB in size and the image’s resolution needs to be less than 1000×1000 pixels.

These new limits should hardly bother anyone wanting to use ImageHost to hotlink to an avatar or signature, but will prevent users from hotlinking to say, their wallpaper collection. You can of course still upload images that go over these limits, but you will need to use thumbnail or text links instead.

I realize there may be users who just want to share their images and don’t know or can’t be bothered with resizing those images to acceptible sizes, so I’ve added a resize feature to my “to do” list. Once this feature is done, you can have ImageHost.org resize the images to acceptible size after upload for you. Unfortunately I can not give an ETA on this feature though.

Update March 13: It seems a pretty major bug caused hotlinking to images of any size or resolution to be not allowed, which confused one important ImageHost.org user (my mother) a lot. This bug has now been fixed – I apologize for any inconvinience caused. In addition I’ve upped the limits a bit (500 KB & 1600×16000 pixels), so only considerably large images will not be eligable for hotlinking.

Update March 23: Received some complaints, hotlinking is currently back to old limits again.

Both servers that are used to host all ImageHost.org content will be upgraded some time today to increase performance and expand capacity. Each server will be upgraded from 4GB RAM to a total of 8GB RAM and each server will have another HDD installed. These upgrades will cause short down time, however the site should be a lot faster again (more RAM means more images that can be cached, and the extra HDDs are used to better distribute I/O load).

It’s been a long while since my last post – to long. There are several reasons for this. One of them is that there were few issues to report: for the most part everything kept working reasonably well in November and December. Only in the past few weeks some performance issues started popping up again.

The current problem with performance mainly lies into finding out how to properly balance new uploads between the two servers used to serve the more than 3 million files that have been uploaded so far. Right now the server to which files are being uploaded to is hardcoded. I’ve got some ideas about how to have the scripts make the choice between servers more intelligently.

Unfortunately I don’t have the opportunity to make major changes to the scripts in the past few weeks. It’s not that I don’t have the time – I got lots actually, but I recently moved and my broadband connection is yet to be reconnected. This makes doing any kind of development frustrating for me.

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I apologize for the slowness at the current moment, but right now the “afternoon peak” traffic is occuring (bandwidth usage is usually at it’s highest point in the late afternoon / early evening European time) and the site is “suffering” from another Digg submission with over 5000 (!) diggs. The net result is that the server is a little overloaded and the network connection (100mbit) is being maxed out.

To combat this problem, I’ve put the new server I talked about in an earlier post (identifiable by the upload url e.imagehost.org) in to active duty immediately. The only problem is that the method my scripts use to transfer new uploads to this server (which unfortunately are still coming from the overloaded server) isn’t terribly reliable, so some uploads may fail. If that happens, just try again.

I apologize for the inconvinience. I have ideas on how these various issues can be addressed and handled better in the future, but unfortunately this will require further script development so it will probably not be ready soon enough to be of any help right now.

Update: above text applied to Friday, November 14. Site performance should now be back to normal.

A few days ago somebody uploaded an image and hotlinked to it from Digg.com, where it made the frontpage! But after it had accumalated 2GB of datatransfer in a single hour the image was promptly disabled, Doh! The bandwidth limits (300MB for files that are exclusively being hotlinked to) are there to stop people from abusing ImageHost.org, but of course I don’t want to impede the linking of files from sites like Digg.com and other major sites.

For this reason I’ve added a “whitelist” of sites where even if you hotlink to files & cause lots of datatransfer, the image won’t get disabled. Sites in the whitelist include Digg (of course), MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Slashdot, LinkedIn and eBay, amonst others. If you still find a file is being disabled for using to much bandwidth when you are hotlinking from a major site (with millions of visitors), drop me a line and I’ll add it to the list if I find the site suitable. Btw, if you use thumbnails or text links to link to your files then bandwidth limits do not apply.

I really should post more often, as then I won’t have to cram to much topics into a single post. Anyway, some news: the “new” server I was talking about in previous posts has been performing well and seems to be able to much better handle the load, even at full 100mbps (10MB/sec) speeds. That it is reaching these speeds meant one other thing though: yet another server was needed to balance the growing need for more bandwidth. The new server has been delivered, but it’ll take some time to setup properly. Expect it to go live later this month.

I’ve also fixed a rather major bug in the bandwidth limit rules, or rather the data the bandwidth limits act upon. If you upload a file to ImageHost.org, it has a hourly bandwidth limit of 300MB per hour. If it goes over this limit in a single hour, the file is deleted. This limit however only applies if you are hotlinking to the file: if you properly use thumbnails or text links to link back to ImageHost.org, the file is not subject to this limit and could potentially use much more bandwidth: even gigabytes of bandwidth per hour is allowed that way.

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It seems like yesterday’s problem returned again today, sadly. I’ve contacted my provider and they have moved the server to a different switch. Initial results show the problem has now vanished. Then again, I thought the same thing yesterday. We’ll only know for sure if the problem stays away in the long run.