Pixeldrain documentation#

Welcome to our brand new documentation site. First I’ll quickly explain what pixeldrain is:

Pixeldrain is a file hosting website developed by Fornax in his lunch breaks at school. It allows you to quickly upload files and share them with other people around the world. From humble beginnings, pixeldrain has grown to be one of the largest file hosting platforms on the internet, serving hundreds of millions of files every month.

Features#

Free#

Upload files up to 10 GB in size.
Download up to 6 GB per day.
Files expire 60 days after the last time they are downloaded.
No storage limit

Pro (€4 / month)#

Upload files up to 100 GB in size.
Download up to 4 TB per 30 days.
Files expire 120 days after the last time they are downloaded.
No storage limit
Download and share files without using the download page (hotlinking)

Prepaid (€0.01 / day, €10 minimum deposit)#

Upload files up to 100 GB in size.
No download limit (downloads are charged at €1 / TB downloaded)
Files do not expire
No storage limit (storage is charged at €4 / TB / month)
Download and share files without using the download page (hotlinking)

History#

The first code commit related to pixeldrain was on 2013-11-25. This was for a Java desktop application to upload files to the pixeldrain server which was written in PHP at the time. Pixeldrain already existed at this point, but not in source control. I am not entirely certain when I started working on pixeldrain, but it must have been somewhere in the summer of 2013.

The pixeldrain.com domain name was registered on 2015-06-07 at 21:18 CET. At this point the site was still running as a simple PHP script which accepted uploads and stored them in a directory. This script was running on a Vultr VPS server with 1 TB of hard drive space.

In June 2016 the site has started growing a little bit, and I was not really a fan of coding in PHP. At school I was learning Java (and I also played a lot of Minecraft, which heavily influenced my interest in Java), so I decided to rewrite the site in Java using the Spring framework.

During 2017 I had already run into some issues with the Java application. Dependency management was a mess, a new version of Spring had come out and I could not figure out how to upgrade to it without a complete rewrite. The Java server was also really slow, and restarting it to update the software took the whole site down for multiple minutes.

I was also very interested in cryptocurrency at this point. I had an obsession with Bitcoin since the very first whitepaper. While looking for ways to expand my storage capacity I came across the Sia project. I became friends with the developers and we talked a lot about tech. Sia is written in Go, which was still fairly new at this point. Go was pretty easy to learn and I wanted to move away from Java anyway, so I decided to rewrite pixeldrain in Go to learn the language.

The first commit to the Go repository of pixeldrain was made on 2017-11-10, and it immediately contained 2523 lines of Go code across 33 files. It was not very good, but I was still learning. The Sia devs were also immensely helpful with teaching me the language.

As the Go server was much faster and more stable than the Java server, pixeldrain quickly started to gain popularity at this point.

By 2020 I had realized that running the site on ad revenue might not be sustainable. On 2020-06-05 I launched my Patreon page, subscribers could browse the site ad-free and their files would last longer before being deleted.

For more history, please refer to my blog on Patreon. In the future I may copy all posts to this site as well.