Ask HN: Are there any decent image hosts left?

DigitialOcean Spaces [1] start at $5/month for 250 GB, which is a lot more than the 25 GB of storage you get with their cheapest droplet.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/

It's running an instance of lolisafe, here are some other sites (many which do allow for registration): https://github.com/WeebDev/lolisafe/wiki/Sites-using-lolisaf...

I don't allow sign ups. It's for me and a few friends only. I pay $5/mo and host my own images - after I grew sick of moving from pomf.se clone to pomf.se clone as they'd all eventually shut down.

Image/File hosting isn't profitable, Sir_Cmpwn [1] has a good write up on why it simply isn't a profitable/good business to get into. In fact, if you read the replies to Sir_Cmpwn's post you'll see I replied... and was using mixtape.moe at the time. And guess what? safe.moe, my other listed option, has shut down too. So it has been 2~ years before both of the image hosts I was using have shut down. safe.moe shutting down is actually why I began hosting my own images with my own domain.

The problem is they don't scale. Once you stop being niche and become popular - the cost to host everything starts growing exponentially while the people willing to donate does not. You'll eventually be spending more on the server(s) than you earn from it. You tank. You shut down. Then someone else thinks they can do better and the cycle continues. This is why there are very few free [0] file hosts that are capable of surviving for long periods of time. I've ran the math once and assuming I grew to 1,000~ regular users a month, I'd have about a years' runway before I'd have to begin charging users or shut down; assuming no donations and none of the 1,000 users are particularly abusive of the service. With donations it might last two or even three years, but it would be an inevitable shutdown as I wouldn't be willing to pay to provide the service past that point. 2-4 years is how long I could use a given host before it went to shit (suffered from the "poison" of needing to monetize to survive) or shut down (couldn't monetize well enough), so it seems like my math isn't too unique to myself either. And this is just the financial side of things - there's the whole administration side of banning abusive users, dealing with DMCA's, dealing with child pornography, and the tech side of scaling, upgrading servers when needed, etc. It's a whole lot to take on.

Sir_Cmpwn, if you happen to read this, I suppose you can add mixtape.moe to your list in a 2019 update. :)

[0] Typically ads somewhere, but many are donation driven by supporters willing to pitch in.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810889 and their blog post is here https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-onli...