Fornax

You may have gotten an e-mail from Patreon saying that you need to switch to credit or debit card to keep supporting me. Unfortunately, it's true. Patreon informed me that PayPal is ending all the Pixeldrain subscriptions which go through PayPal (why does everything have to start with a P?). There i

Exactly one month ago was my 30th birthday. Normally, when it's my birthday I temporarily increase the download limit to celebrate. However, this time the website was plagued with issues. First the thumbnail generator crashed and took down the site. Shortly after fixing that, the database ran into a

.. the database is broken. Last week pixeldrain suffered a lot of downtime. It's a problem that can unfortunately not be fixed easily. To get realtime updates on the status of this issue, please follow the #announcements channel in Discord. The problem Pixeldrain runs on a database called ScyllaDB.

On the 23rd, 24th and 26th of April 2026 Pixeldrain experienced some downtime. I assume this was some kind of denial of service attack, though it could also have been an accident, I can't really be sure. Nobody has come forward to claim credit. I will still refer to the person behind this as the "at

Another year has come to an end. It has been another wild ride. Here is the yearly recap. Also check out last year's recap if you're interested. That's incidentally also the previous post on this blog.. I have not been very motivated to write anything lately. Statistics What most people are probably

Hello lovely Patrons. Another year has passed, and it's time for another recap. Check out last year's recap as well. Once again a lot has happened this year. It was a busy (and pretty stressful) time for me. Last year this graph looked like the start of an exponential growth phase. This time it look

Pixeldrain is moving to a new storage provider. We have a whole rack of storage servers. They're nearly ready. These servers will greatly improve pixeldrain's performance and stability. All together the servers weigh over 1100 KG! In total there will be 11 servers with 36 harddrives each. Each drive

Hello Patrons, Rclone just released a new version with Pixeldrain Filesystem support. It took a long time to get this change merged, but it's finally here. Now you can use Rclone with pixeldrain without having to compile your own executable. For those who don't know what rclone is: It's a command-li

Hello lovely patrons, Pixeldrain now has a handy-dandy account dashboard. This dashboard replaces the old user page (which was filled with clutter and text) with a bunch of structured panels which you can use to see your account's status at a single glance. The dashboard contains more information in

If you are on the Discord or following me on Mastodon/Twitter you might have already read about it, but pixeldrain now has three servers in Tokyo! This took longer than expected. I already ordered these systems in November. First they had to be shipped from the USA to Tokyo which took a month. Then

Hi people, I have doubled the transfer cap for all Patreon plans. So Pro now has 4 TB, Persistence 8 TB, etc. The file expiry time for free users has been extended to 120 days (4 months). According to my stats only 3.8% of all used bandwidth is from subscribers. And that's while the subscribers pay

That's right. The filesystem is here.. sort of. The tech is still experimental. It's a completely separate system from the files/albums that we have now. Here is a guide to help you getting started: https://pixeldrain.com/filesystem Here are some important things to know: The filesystem is experimen

Hello lovely supporters. I have set up a little Discord community for you with a few friends. Feel free to join and vibe with us. There are channels for talking about anything and channels for talking in your native tongue. You might even catch me playing runescape or factorio from time to time. The

The pixeldrain servers are overloaded currently. There is a huge traffic peak and my system was not equipped to handle it. I have ordered more capacity, but the datacenter where my servers are located does not deliver in the weekends, so it will be monday the earliest that I can install the new serv

Hi people. The end of the year is nigh and I wanted to do another little recap like I did last year. I was just looking through the old post and, oh my, a lot has changed. This year has been crazy. First of all, I quit my job this year. Pixeldrain used to be my little pet project that I worked on in

This week I started hearing from many customers that their download speed has suddenly dropped to around 30 KiB/s, well below what's acceptable. I spent some time investigating this and I have come to the conclusion that this is happening due to factors out of my control. I have some theories as to

Hi everyone, The prepaid plan, which used to be exclusive to business users, is now available to everyone in the EU. Why only the EU? Well, there's two reasons: I need to report taxes in each country where I do business. Normally Patreon does this for me, but because the prepaid plan does not use Pa

You can now directly upload files to your albums on pixeldrain. Either drag-and-drop, click the upload button or press 'u' to start uploading. Pasting screenshots with CTRL + V is also an option. This also works on the file manager page.

This was a great year for pixeldrain. Here are some statistics: The number of Patreon subscribers increased from 207 to 1341 Monthly earnings through Patreon increased from €598 to €3041 54 340 Terabytes of bandwidth was used (that's 54 Petabytes!) 101 160 700 files were viewed through the website 1

Tomorrow I will be disabling new subscriptions for the Pro (€2) tier. The €4 tier (currently called Resolve) will be renamed to Pro. It will stay this way at least until the end of November. For existing patrons nothing will change. The limits of your account will stay the same and the price of the

This year my Patreon page has been growing incredibly fast. But expenses have been growing too. Now a few of my hosting providers have announced they are raising prices because of the electricity crisis in Europe. I would eventually like to work on pixeldrain full time but to do that the project wou

I have overhauled the user settings page to make it easier to navigate. Pages with much content have been split up in separate sub-pages. This should make it easier to find the configuration options that you need.

To celebrate the deployment of pixeldrain's new storage system I have raised the file size limit from 10 GB to 20 GB for free users and from 20 GB to 50 GB for Pro subscribers. I have also raised file expiry from 30 days to 60 days! The free download limit has been updated from 10 GB per day to 20 G

Patreon just released subscription billing. Here's the announcement post: https://blog.patreon.com/introducing-a-new-patron-billing-option This means you are charged on the day you subscribed instead of always on the first day of the month. I often need to give refunds to people who subscribed at th

Here we go! The update I have been working on for the last two months is now running in production. Pixeldrain now uses Reed-Solomon encoding to store files. This encoding scheme has a lot of benefits over the way pixeldrain used to store files: Files are stored with a 8/4 data/parity ratio. This me

In the last week of July pixeldrain lost about 6% of all files it was storing due to a database crash. Here is what happened: In the second week of July I went on a three week vacation. In the week before I left I had upgraded my ScyllaDB cluster from version 4.6 to 5.0. Unbeknownst to me this new v

Thank you all for your support. After 7 years of development my hobby project is finally turning into a profitable business. I'm still working hard on new updates, I have some big plans. Right now I'm still working on cleaning up the data loss incident from a few weeks ago. There's a lot to fix in t

Hi, one of the database servers crashed while I'm on vacation. I didn't have the tools with me to fix the issue immediately. Some files were lost due to inconsistencies in the database. If you are unable to download one of your files this is probably the reason. The data is not recoverable unfortuna

Hi, There was a problem with pixeldrain's mail server which caused the Patreon integration to fail. You were not able to upgrade your account to Pro in the last few days because of this. It has been fixed now. If you subscribed and were unable to upgrade your pixeldrain account you can do that now b

Here I am again :-P I have added some more advanced sharing settings for patrons with the Persistence tier or higher. You can now add links to your top and bottom banners to point at your website, social feeds or wherever. And it's also possible to limit which sites are allowed to embed your files.

Hello, I have made it easier to activate your subscription on pixeldrain. All you need to do now is click a button on your pixeldrain profile page and your account will be upgraded. Clicking the button takes you to this page: After clicking Allow your account will be upgraded to Pro. If you are alre

Hi, Patreon has a limitation that it can only charge subscriptions on the first day of the month. This means that if you just signed up yesterday you will be charged again today. Patreon is working on a fix for this, but it's not ready yet. In the meantime I'll offer you this solution: If you signed

Hello Patrons, I have removed the storage limits for Pro and Resolve plans. Have a nice day :-)

Hello, I have added branding options to the file viewer. Patrons with a supporter level of Persistence (€8) or higher get access to file viewer branding. You can use this to customize the look of your download pages. The file viewer colour theme, header image, background image and footer image are a

It took us 16 months to get 100 supporters on Patreon, and then it took us 6 weeks to get to 200. Thank you all for your support!

You can now edit albums through the gallery view on pixeldrain. The only feature left to do here is adding files to the album. That will be added next week. pixeldrain gallery editor (YouTube)

You can see how much data you have left on your user page: https://pixeldrain.com/user And on the subscription page you can configure bandwidth sharing: https://pixeldrain.com/user/subscription

Hello lovely Patrons, I already alluded to this on twitter, but there are going to be some changes in how bandwidth is counted. Currently all subscriptions provide downloaders with high speed downloads and an ad-free experience. Your hotlink bandwidth cap is only used when you link to files directly

Bulk download from file manager (YouTube)

If you have any ideas for improving pixeldrain I would love to hear it! I'm especially looking for features you would be willing to pay a little bit for. Let's have a good old discussion. There are no stupid ideas here :-)

This allows anyone to see how it works and make improvements to the website. The API (the part which actually handles all the data) still remains closed for now. Maybe I'll open that up later. https://github.com/Fornaxian/pixeldrain_web

It has finally come to this. I have been debating whether disabling the video player is worth the loss of potential new users, but today I have decided to just try it. Pixeldrain has been struggling with content which breaks the content policy for a long time. You might think "If they're keeping tha

Pixeldrain now has a page where you can manage your API keys: https://pixeldrain.com/user/api_keys. On this page you can see on which devices you are logged in to your pixeldrain account. You can also use the delete button to log out from any of the devices. The user agent detection didn't work prop

I noticed that some people were getting pretty close to their subscription limits. I have added 4 new subscription types to give everyone more room to grow. Check it out :-) https://pixeldrain.com/#pro

Hello patrons, I may have to start adding a storage limit to accounts soon. It has come to my attention that some people upload A LOT of stuff to their pixeldrain accounts (like everything in this world, it follows the Pareto Principle, 20% of the users use 80% of the space). This is fine and all, b

Hey people. I'm working on a system for bandwidth accounting so I can allow you to directly embed files in your websites / apps or wherever. The idea is that every registered pixeldrain user gets a monthly data cap which will only be used up when files are downloaded directly (without going through

Pixeldrain now has a QR code button on the home page and on the file viewer. You can use this to generate a code for any file you want to share. Other people can scan the code with their camera and download the file. It even works when printed on paper!

Hello patrons, I have completely rewritten the home page uploader. It's now using the Svelte framework. New features include upload time estimation, upload rate and better error handling. Let me know if anything broke in the update or if you're still missing something :-) New pixeldrain uploader (Yo

There is now an Embed button on the file viewer which you can use to embed pixeldrain files on your own web pages.