4 ms·

Imgur is one of those sites where noone believed it would last, due to the vast amount of money it takes to run a site like that (at the time) and it being the

by thejosh 13y ago

Imgur is one of those sites where noone believed it would last, due to the vast amount of money it takes to run a site like that (at the time) and it being the main way people posted images to reddit. Glad to see it has lasted and has a community built around images posted from reddit. :)

pyvpx 13y ago
what people seem to gloss over is he/they had good friends at Voxel (iirc) which was a growing CDN. they gave him bandwidth on the cheap in the hopes they're traffic would surge. it did, and everyone was happy. if imageshack could have made the numbers work with a performant CDN back then, they'd have made the cut and we'd probably be talking about something else :)
bluedino 13y ago
Reddit can also be hostile to other image hosts
- X-Istence 13y ago
  A lot of that has to do with the fact that other image hosts are slow!
- fafner 13y ago
  As the article mentions most image hosts simply don't scale to the reddit user base and once an image gets too popular they either pull it or break down under the load. And more importantly many other image hosts add aggressive advertisement and don't allow direct linking. (Imgur recently started to redirect direct image links to the normal image view which has ads for referrals not from reddit though.) I think the other image hoster which is similar is http://minus.com/ http://minus.com/. (And min.us, unlike imgur, does not downscale images or force convert PNG to JPEG or increases JPEG compression. Although I think you can prevent imgur from doing this with a "premium account".) edit: Someone also mentioned https://mediacru.sh/ https://mediacru.sh/ which is open source.
georgiecasey 13y ago
> Imgur is one of those sites where noone believed it would last, due to the vast amount of money it takes to run a site like that (at the time) Like Youtube when I first came across it in 2005. I thought either bandwidth costs or legal claims would kill it within months.

by thejosh 13y ago

pyvpx 13y ago

what people seem to gloss over is he/they had good friends at Voxel (iirc) which was a growing CDN. they gave him bandwidth on the cheap in the hopes they're traffic would surge. it did, and everyone was happy. if imageshack could have made the numbers work with a performant CDN back then, they'd have made the cut and we'd probably be talking about something else :)

bluedino 13y ago

Reddit can also be hostile to other image hosts

X-Istence 13y ago
A lot of that has to do with the fact that other image hosts are slow!
fafner 13y ago
As the article mentions most image hosts simply don't scale to the reddit user base and once an image gets too popular they either pull it or break down under the load. And more importantly many other image hosts add aggressive advertisement and don't allow direct linking. (Imgur recently started to redirect direct image links to the normal image view which has ads for referrals not from reddit though.) I think the other image hoster which is similar is http://minus.com/ http://minus.com/. (And min.us, unlike imgur, does not downscale images or force convert PNG to JPEG or increases JPEG compression. Although I think you can prevent imgur from doing this with a "premium account".) edit: Someone also mentioned https://mediacru.sh/ https://mediacru.sh/ which is open source.

georgiecasey 13y ago

> Imgur is one of those sites where noone believed it would last, due to the vast amount of money it takes to run a site like that (at the time) Like Youtube when I first came across it in 2005. I thought either bandwidth costs or legal claims would kill it within months.