As a webmaster, everyone wants to have their own image hosting service, and Xiaoz is no exception. After trying some open source or free image hosting services on the market and not being satisfied, he decided to develop and operate his own. In December 2017, https://imgurl.org/ was launched and has been in operation for over 2 years. Let's share the journey.

Data Sharing of imgurl.org

Since the launch of imgurl.org in December 2017, it has been in operation for over 2 years. Currently, more than 370,000 images have been uploaded and the number is still growing.

As of now, around 400 images are uploaded daily, and about 10,000 images are uploaded monthly. For more data, you can visit https://imgurl.org/home/upload_num to check.

Currently, the daily average IP of the image hosting site (excluding images) is around 800, showing a slow upward trend.

CDN Selection

Image hosting sites consume a lot of bandwidth, and the CDN services on the market are not cheap. The prices make it difficult for small webmasters to afford such costs. Therefore, Xiaoz decided to combine self-hosting with the free CloudFlare CDN service to save costs. He also praised CloudFlare for being a trustworthy service in the industry.

He purchased several VPS servers with unlimited bandwidth to set up Nginx reverse proxy caching. The cost for this part is about $20/month. During peak times, it is possible to have a monthly traffic of 20-30 Tb. However, the high traffic is actually due to abuse by gambling websites (which will be discussed later).

Current Costs

• Image hosting server: $10/month
• FTP server: $3/month
• CDN node server: $20/month
• Manpower maintenance cost: not calculated yet

Abuse by Gambling Websites

Currently, all self-hosted CDN nodes have been connected to Alibaba Cloud Monitoring. When the bandwidth or connection count is too high, it automatically sends me notifications. After several checks and log analysis, it was found that the high traffic was caused by gambling websites uploading advertising images. Some of these images are large GIF animations, with each image being several megabytes in size. It should be noted that gambling websites actually have a significant amount of traffic, which consumes the majority of the bandwidth.

Although it is clearly stated in the rules that the service is not allowed to be used for gambling, it is difficult to prevent. Even with content filtering, it is challenging to completely stop it. The only solution is to regularly analyze the logs and delete the inappropriate images. If you are planning to create an image hosting service or are already running one, it is important to be aware of this issue and avoid unnecessary bandwidth and traffic consumption.

Conclusion

Although many webmasters create their own image hosting services, very few of them are profitable. There are also many instances where such services fail midway. It is recommended to choose an image hosting service that has been in operation for more than 2 years, such as https://imgurl.org/ (a shameless self-promotion). If you are planning to create your own image hosting service and make it publicly available, please take measures to protect against abuse by gambling websites and implement image moderation to avoid misuse.

If you are looking for image hosting software, you can check out ImgURL Pro, which supports multiple external storage options and is currently on a 60% discount. If your requirements are not too demanding and you just need occasional use, you can also visit the ImgURL online service at https://imgurl.org/.