[atinoda-kestrel]

A long time ago I ran a file hosting service that almost exclusively served one particular "fringe" community (for some reason it got really popular on one site and spread from there). I was running it anonymously at the time (for both me and for the users), and logging was minimal...

... so imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail (at the abuse@ address, no less) offering to buy uploader/downloader info (IPs, file info, email addresses, etc.)

Imagine their surprise when I told them that I didn't have most of what they wanted in the first place, and that they could kindly go suck a pig. I checked out the company in question, and they seemed rather sparsely established, so my assumption was that they were a shell company for somebody. Never really looked into it after I told them to go to hell, and never heard back from them. AFAIK there wasn't a lot of pirate traffic (I shut that down and banned/reported aggressively whenever I found it/was notified about piracy or other illegal stuff), mostly just niche content that I assume was original... so I doubt it was an MPAA/RIAA thing. Odd.

(Sorry for keeping names out of it. The site was super well-known within the community, and I'd rather keep my involvement in said community quite isolated from my real life.)

Glad to be out of the file host business, that's for sure.

[kinkora]

I might be a lil late reading this but I have a slightly off tangential question if you could have time to indulge me in.

1. why did you get out of the file host business or why were you glad to?

2. how did you get out of it? sold, fizzled, etc..

[atinoda-kestrel]

> 1. why did you get out of the file host business or why were you glad to?

Handling abuse complaints, wrangling bandwidth spikes, etc. ended up taking way more time than I wanted to give to it. This was before a lot of the modern easily-scalable hosting services were around, so it's not like I could just automagically spin up new instances.

So basically, I ran out of time in my day, and since I already had a good day job I figured "fuck it" and sold out.

I maaaaaybe could've gone full time with it, but it would have been really hard and I would have been competing against some already well-established players. I didn't have much presence outside a particular community, and growing it into a general-purpose thing would've probably killed the "one of us" karma that let me get popular in the first place... so... yeah, not a good plan.

> 2. how did you get out of it? sold, fizzled, etc..

Sold. The party that bought it promptly ran it into the ground in a rather impressively stupid series of decisions, and it was gone within a year. Oh well. Not my problem. I got a decent payout, which -- being younger and stupid -- I promptly blew. So basically in the end all I got was a year or two of really fun living. :)

I'm actually OK with that. It didn't start as more than just a way to serve a specific community's needs, it blew up in popularity and as a result I got some cool experience and some spending money out of it. Seems like a successful project in retrospect.

[kqr]

About 1: all of your experiences still hold today. A friend of mine started a file hosting business on the side when he was still in elementary school. Much like yours, it quickly became popular in one small community, and then spread out of that. Today, 8 or so years later, he has quit to work full time on it and he works on it... a lot.

"Easily scalable" only works to a point, then it quickly becomes expensive unless you create a solution tailored specifically for your problems, at which point you're negating the "easily" part again.