[adventured]

> But I always wondered how any of these random image hosts afforded bandwidth ... reminds of the other various ones like TwitPic who was saved from being taken offline by Twitter

Image hosting is relatively cheap, so you can have good margins if you can get a lot of use and fill the ad inventory. The way you do it, is by running as thin of an operation as possible.

When the first wave of one-click image hosts were popping up back in 2004-2005 roughly, I noticed one called ImageVenue. The founder, Vlad, was out of Eastern Europe somewhere. I emailed him and bought advertising, the price was right and he had a lot of impressions to fill. Back then he was just buying tons of $40/month dedicated servers from one specific host, using a img7.imagevenue.com scheme for each machine, and filling up the boxes. You can still use ImageVenue.com 17 years later, even though the traffic for the service has never been what it was during the early peak years (tons of image hosting competition swamped the market). I had a running dialogue with Vlad across about a year, he also mentioned in discussing Ajax (early popularity days for Ajax) use at the time, that he wasn't familiar with it and was "only really good with C++ and PHP". So I assume some of it was built in PHP. He was managing ads in-house, where he handled each sale by email, negotiating impressions and duration each month.

And regarding TwitPic, circa 2010: "TwitPic is generating $1.5 to $2 million in ad sales on an annual basis, with 70% profit margins, says its founder Noah Everett"

https://mixergy.com/interviews/twitpic-noah-everett/

[noaheverett]

Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while. Yes, funny story, Twitter at that time was threatening to cut off our API access due to us trying to trademark "Twitpic". We had been in the process of trying to trademark our name for many years prior. Our initial application hit tons of hurdles with other Twit* marks (my fault for filing late). Fast forward about 4 years after we'd finally worked through all the issues which required us to file a whole new trademark application and this one ran afoul (pun intended) of Twitter's legal. I assume that in 2009'ish when we originally filed, Twitter either didn't care then or we weren't big enough to be a threat, but I guess that changed in 2014.

Long story long, I basically ended up giving Twitpic to Twitter (I wanted the photos to live on). We were already feeling the squeeze from their own native image feature plus some other compounding events like Google Adsense banning us out-of-the-blue with no recourse that really affected our margins [Hey Google, you still owe us $100k+ ;)].

It was one of the best, most educating times of my life. Just thankful I had that opportunity to run Twitpic for those years, God blessed me.

The End.

P.S. I'm still tinkering https://ark.fm

[ChrisArchitect]

Thanks for popping on. A legendary time back then. And ultimately I'm glad that Twitter kept the photos living on as preservation is so important. But man, any insights into the bandwidth imgur must incur to maintain things? They are similar in that for a time they were the defacto image host capability for reddit before reddit rolled its own.

[noaheverett]

I imagine Imgur now is many times bigger than we were. If I remember correctly around 2009/2010 our Amazon rep said Twitpic accounted for about 1% of data stored in S3 at that time and I think our cost was around $100k/month. We eventually got that down to $60k'ish when they gave us "special" pricing and later on we put bare-metal caching servers in front of it to store/serve hot images which further decreased it.

Disclaimer: Hopefully I'm remembering correctly, it's been a while!