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.

(more…)