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Comment by waleedka | Hacker News Reader

Website Screenshots: http://www.bitpixels.com

Serves 40 million images a month. It can generate small thumbnails or large screenshots of full-length Web pages. It runs itself and I rarely touch it, but I don't have time to improve and monetize it.

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Wow .. that is something I have been looking for quite some time. In the meantime I decided to make a custom solution, but yours seem to work way smoother.

- Do you cache images? If so, how long are they cached? - Are there any restrictions, beside adding the attribution link, for commercial usage?

Thank you. I cache images on App Engine. I have a simple API to force cache eviction (email me if you need it). There are no restrictions other than the attribution link.

40m images a month as a free service? How much is that costing you to keep up?

If you don't sell it, please open source this. :-)

Please email me traffic details and more info. Would be very interested in taking over, or working with you, on this project to grow it to that next level.

Do you make anything form it now? What are you hoping to get for it? - and what stack are you using?

It's two parts: An App Engine/Python for the UI and user registration, and a Linux server for image capturing (Python, Javascript, RabbitMQ, ...etc.). At first we used popular libraries like Phantomjs, but eventually had to write our own to scale better.

I'm experimenting right now with moving the image capturing code to an App Engine managed VM to simplify things and make it scale easier.

Which library are you using for image capture? Been using webkit2png ( https://github.com/AdamN/python-webkit2png/ ) for a personal project, but I'm interested to hear your experiences.

Could you mention why you stopped using PhantomJS? Also, how are you supporting flash?

Could you please elaborate on what your own implementation turned out to be?

How do you make money from it right now?

I don't yet. I needed a service like this a while ago and the existing ones were too expensive for my level of traffic, so I built one and then decided to open it up to others as well. That was years ago and it grew over time. I never got around to building a payment system for it. It was always something I wanted to do but never had enough free time to do it.

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