catbox

Introducing Catbox Spaces! + Server Upgrades!

Hi there!

As we approach Catbox’s 10th birthday (jeez I’ve been at this for a while.), I wanted to share something I’ve been working on in sort-of secret last year - Catbox Spaces!

Catbox Spaces

Catbox Spaces is a new, paid service I’ve been developing to help content creators share their content with their followers. It’s designed to be a content publishing platform separated from social media sites and payment/subscription processors (as Catbox generally has a more… sensible Terms of Service/Acceptable Use Policy). A content creator who owns a Space can create content packs that can be viewed on the site, with measures taken to restrict downloading/hotlinking of the images. You can also create password protected content packs. This can be taken even further by tying your space in with your Patreon or SubscribeStar account to have access based on pledge tier. The Space is highly customizable too, letting you style it how you want. You can also see view statistics for not just your Space, but individual content packs too. Further planned features include automatic Glaze anti-AI protection, custom CSS (for those that want to get really in-depth with their customization), and more!

Note that the funding and expenses that I incur from this new endeavor is completely separate from Catbox’s. Catbox will remain user funded, and user expense driven. Don’t worry, I’m not going to become some big corpo. I’ve just seen what’s been happening recently with sites like Imgur, Tumblr, and others heavily restricting NSFW content. I’ve even been seeing sporadic reports that Mega has been purging folders of NSFW content. That’s one of the great things about Catbox Spaces - I’m not a corporation (well, technically Catbox LLC is, but it’s just me!), plus, I actually care! Did you know I read about 4 abuse/content reports a day for Catbox? And I handle each one individually. Bet you Mega doesn’t do that.

If you have any questions, please reach out to me via email! I am more than willing to answer any questions. Thank you all again for your support!

Server Upgrades

I’ve been a little quiet on here regarding upgrades, but I assure you that Catbox continues to grow - both physically and logically! As we’ve increased in size, so has the need to add additional storage. Some of you may have noticed the brief downtime back on the 26th of January - that was me putting in a new, larger, and much more powerful server for Catbox! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to put it into production, but I am aiming to do so either this weekend or next! The new server brings with it new, redundant SSD storage for critical files, as well as a dedicated 87 TB of disk space for user files. Combined with the storage array that’s currently attached to the old server, that brings Catbox’s total on-premise storage capacity to 162 TB!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! I hope you all have had not just a great Christmas, but also a great year. I know Catbox has! I'm looking forward to the things we can do in the new year!

That being said, the company I ordered Catbox's Christmas Cards from (I started to send some out to companies & people we work/partner with as of last year) sent us way too many! Which means that now's your chance to snag one as well! If you'd like one (for free!), please fill out this form! I ended up with about 100 extra, so be sure to hop on it! As long as the form is open, I still have cards!

 The card's artwork was done by Élodie Dow!

2024 End of Year Poll

Hello everynyan! How are you? Fine thank you.

2024 is drawing to a close, and as such I wanted to run an end of year poll to see how everyone is feeling. Plus, there's a bunch of cool statistics about Catbox in there, like number of users, total uploads, and more!

Click here to be taken to the poll. Thank you again for your continued support!

Alternative Support Method

Hey everyone! It's been quite a while since the last time I posted on Patreon. The blog has had a few update posts since then as well, but nothing too major has been going on...

Some of you may have taken the recent end-of-year poll that was featured on the front page of Catbox for a while, and one of the questions was "On a scale of 1-10, would a paid subscription plan granting access to additional features interest you? (replacing Patreon)". Based on the responses I got to that question, there was a pretty clear majority not interested in a paid subscription plan - however there was still a bit that were interested.

Since this directly relates to you guys, I figured it'd be best to directly poll you all and get your opinions on the matter.

Would you be interested in a monthly reoccurring subscription alternative to Patreon, which granted access to additional features, including possibly: 

• a custom subdomain for your files; 
• up to 500 MB upload (100 GB of space for uploads larger than 200 MB); 
• password protected files; 
• management of Litterbox files

Pricing would be somewhere between $7 to $12, but I am open to hearing what price points you all would think is appropriate.

Please feel free to comment below, and I will answer any questions or concerns. Note that nothing will change in the immediate future - this is just a public (private I guess) opinion poll. Catbox will remain free and user supported, as it has for the last 7 years.

Catbox Store Launch!

Hi there!

It's been just a short while since my last post, but I've been working on getting some goodies behind the scenes in order to prop up some additional money for Catbox, and to that end, I'm happy to announce that Catbox now has a merch store! 

Currently, you can purchase between 1 to 10 stickers of either the dark or light theme logo of Catbox. This won't be all though, so keep an eye out for additional drops of neat new stuff.

If you're a $7 or above Patron, you'll automatically receive a free sticker or two, assuming Patreon has your address on file and you chose to share it. If you're not, pledge between now and December 6th to get in on the offer. If you'd like to buy more/support Catbox more directly, then feel free to buy directly from the store!

Thanks again for everything guys. I'm hoping to get more stuff done on Catbox soon as my day-job slows down around this time of year. 

Regarding the recent slowness/500 Errors

Hey there,

I just wanted to make a post about the recent errors some people may have been experiencing on Catbox when uploading a file. You may receive various errors, including a 504 Timeout, 500 Internal Server Error, or ID A:FF:FFFFFF. The root cause of these issues is primarily traffic and throughput.

What's been done recently

Catbox has moved inside it's datacenter to a half cabinet colocation. You may or may not have noticed the downtime, but the perks of this new location is it is has 10 Gbit/s fiber. The downside is that the current server for Catbox is only ethernet at 1 gbit/s. For perspective, here's what Catbox's average traffic graph looks like:

On average, Catbox pushes it's 1gbit pretty consistently. In response to that, I've purchased a new server capable of 10gbit/s, with additional storage, as Catbox is also having issues with disk space. I expect this server to be ready for production by the end of the year, after which these types of errors should be less common.

I just wanted to thank everyone who has been a patron with me. The bills are no longer inconsequential to me, so even taking 50% of the bill will help massively. You the real MVP.

Happy 5th Birthday Catbox

Helloooo~.

First and foremost, wow I'm over 2 weeks late for the post. I'm actually pretty ashamed.

More importantly, the earth has completed another revolution around the sun, and Catbox grows another year older. This year was pretty sleepy. I know in the previous birthday post I abandoned the redesign, but that wasn't true. I've actually been working on it here and there. Unfortunately progress on it has been slow since I've lost interest in the general design of it (the hard parts are done really, it's just menial copying and formatting that's getting to me). 

As some of you may have noticed, the server costs have increased. This is an unfortunate side affect of gaining popularity/traction as a file host. You just keep growing and growing - it's not like you can just dump stuff. Here are some current statistics as of April

• Bandwidth used: 198.76 TiB (approx. 217 TB)
• Storage used: 10.5 TB on Catbox, 4 TB on Lain (idle file offload)
• Total files uploaded:  3,670,000+ 
• Unique Uploaders: 215,000+
• Registered Users: 8,000+
• Top 50,000 websites according to alexa.com

I recently got a full time job as well, which has really been cutting into my freetime (read: catbox time). Working from 8 to 5 kills a nocturnal person like me, so I pretty much come home after work and pass out. 

I promise I have stuff in the works right now. I've started to work on the redesign again, in addition to some back end fixes. I'm also planning on deploying new hardware to handle the increase in files/processing power. Hopefully I can get this done within a month or two (no promises on that :[ ).

Thanks again to everyone who has stuck with me on this long journey. I know a lot of you have come from other pomf.se-style file hosts, and we've all seen a lot of them come and go. Here's to another year of Catbox, the first (believe it or not) and the last large pomf "clone".

Happy 4th Birthday Catbox!

As always, thanks to the wonderful Pettankon for the art!

Another rotation around the sun, and another year for Catbox! 2018 was kind of crazy! Being forced from my original VPS provider into owning my own hardware in a datacenter, going to Japan, and Mixtape kicking the bucket (i guess that’s 2019 but close enough), and all the small stuff I’m sure i’m missing in between, It’s been a blast!

However, it is with sadness that I do have some bad news: I’m scrapping the total redesign I had planned. Trust me, it hurts me just as much as it hurts you. I have a couple reasons for this - mainly that I was encountering technological problems that would have required either a total do-over with a different framework, or leaving certain pages without basic functionalities. In addition, I’ve talked with multiple people close to me and they felt that the redesign wasn’t necessarily an improvement. I’ve taken their constructive criticisms to heart, and realized that it would make more sense to make the current iconic design of Catbox better. 

Hopefully I’ll be able to work on Catbox a bit more now that I have more free time as well. A lot of improvements lately have been on the back-end/management side. 

And as always, I want to thank my Patreon supporters for covering nearly all of the server costs now! I also want to thank everyone who has been with me for this ride. Here’s to 4 years, and hopefully many more!

$7 Sticker Reward heads-up

For those of you who are in the $7 and up tiers, Patreon may be asking to submit your billing/shipping information in order to receive your reward. I honestly have no idea what it's going to ask, or if it's even going to ask at all, but I wanted to give you a heads up before you're charged. If you're international, don't worry! You'll still get your reward.

I hope to get the stickers mailed by the end of the first week of April, assuming that Patreon processes pledges on time this month.

Budget updates + Trello for Patrons

お久しぶりです～！

It's been a while since my last update. To tell the truth, I've been kind of lazy... I've also got some good and bad news.

Starting off with the bad news, because I'm sure that's what everyone wants to see first: Catbox's operating costs have changed by quite a bit. Due to bandwidth limitations (Catbox was capping it's 100 mbit connection almost daily), I've had to upgrade to a 1gbit unmetered connection. This is an increase of $250/month. I was price shocked too, but in the end, I acknowledge the fact that it'll be better for Catbox. With the upgrade, Catbox will be much faster and almost never stutter. Plus, money talks when you're dealing with certain... aspects of companies.

Moving into good news, thumbnails have pretty much completely been generated for Catbox! The view page for your files should load much quicker now, especially on mobile connections. Retroactively generating about 300K~ thumbnails was a little time and CPU consuming, but it's all for the better! Also, Project Lain has decreased in price by about $30.

In addition to this, I'm inviting all of my Patrons to join my Trello board. Think of it like a big "to-do" board. I want to guys to have a more hands-on option with the development of Catbox, so being invited to the board will let you comment and vote on aspects of Catbox's development! I'm also always open for new ideas, so don't be afraid to give suggestions! You'll get an email to your Patreon email in the next couple days with an invite link.

Finally, I'm looking into new ways I can reward my Patrons here. Things like increases to file size,  expiring files, personal sub-domains, and other fun stuff. After all, it's thanks to you guys that Catbox has made it almost 3 and a half years! Keep an eye out for another end-of-the-year poll, and any new small changes I may make!

Colocation updates - Growing pains

Hey everyone. It's been a pretty tough week - but everything is okay!

As some of you might have noticed, Catbox was a little wonky last week, and that's because I finally switched us over to my own hardware. In a data center. In LA. So besides the fact that on the Monday I drove into downtown LA, circled around the building for about 20 minutes trying to find a spot to park, saw someone push their's dog's poo into the street with a stick, paid $3.50 to park anyway, walked across the street, and delivered the server, it was pretty smooth! A little hiccup involving the boot loader delayed the actual switch-over until Wednesday, and a couple of you managed to upload some files on the old server during the switch, but as of right now, Catbox is 100%!

I switched web server software as well to Nginx for performance reasons. I won't detail them here, but tl;dr Nginx serves static content better than Apache. The only downside is the configuration is a little bit tougher. You'll notice a couple funny things, like only being logged in for 2~ hours, or albums might have a different look. Those should be ironed out by the end of the week.

The greatest part about this is that I managed to get a great deal with a provider, at only $79/month. Their support is amazing too, even with me kinda blundering into their building with my hardware. This means that more of the Patreon money can go towards a reserve account I've made for Catbox, in case of any unforeseen expenditures. 

Again, I love your guys' support, and hope to make Catbox something that everyone can enjoy, while keeping it easy and free. Your support on Patreon means a lot to me! And for my NEET brethren, just get the word out! If your friends are still using Imgur, tell them about how they compress your images to hell and back. If they use Mixtape, well, they're no friends of mine! 

Colocation - It's finally happening!

After many months in development, hopefully it's worth the wait!

I've finally purchased all the necessary hardware and found myself a colocation company in LA with reasonable prices, and have sufficient support (from you guys!) to move forward with it. While the initial cost is high, I'm confident that this will put Catbox on the right path for long term stability. Since I feel like I didn't really explain what colocation is, check out this article about it. Basically, it frees me from being tied to X amount of disk space and X amount of processing power. Disk space being the big thing! 

So, how much WILL the new cost be? Here's the breakdown of Catbox's newly projected monthly costs:

• $80/month - Base for colocation
• $100/month - Extra for bandwidth
• $40/month - Project Lain (this may vary, depending on some technical factors. I need to do the math.)
• $20/year - Catbox.moe domain
• $11/year - kotori.rocks domain

To come together for a new projected monthly cost of $222/month. It's definitely a larger number than what I'm paying right now, but it's worth it for not having to pull my hair out when I dip to 20 GB of disk space remaining.  Plus, I own the hardware, so it's easier for me to expand should the need arise. PLUS, expanding with another front-end server/storage server would be a snap. Catbox is really turning out to be something! 

I'm not finalizing any deals yet, as I'm still fishing around for quotes, but the $180/month is the best quote I've got right now. I'll keep Patreon and the blog updated with any finalized details, and any planned downtime regarding the move.

Thanks again to all my patrons, and everyone who's stuck with me! Without your help, I'd probably still be on shared web-hosting!

Happy 3rd Birthday Catbox! + Catbox LTS

もう一回！

Thanks again to Pettankon for the art. This one is gonna be long, so skip to the important part if you want.

What another year! While not a whole lot changed with Catbox, a lot of stuff has been brewing in the background.I should first address the silence as far as statistics and updates to the site. I’ll come out and say it outright - I fucked the statistics up. During a server migration I didn’t configure Apache correctly, and now I’m reeling in it with a log file that’s absolute garbage. I also started my first year of college last year, and between that full time, a part time job, and sleeping, my schedule was pretty full. HOWEVER, I have still managed to make smaller changes, like the ability to check every file on your view page, so you can delete or add them to an album. You can also sort by oldest/newest. There’s been a whole host of optimizations to the back end code as well (reminder i made catbox 3 years ago, and it was my first website). I also enjoyed all of your End of Year 2017 Poll responses. Sifting out the meme responses, I got some actually valuable insight into how people feel about Catbox and it’s current standing.

But where are the big changes?! They’re coming soon! I have a lot of things I’m not satisfied with about Catbox. Some of the things I plan on changing/reworking (while maintaining the API as it is) are:

• Albums - They look horrible right now tbh, and I can tell a lot of users are confused on how to add/remove files from them.
• Overall UI Redesign - Not incredibly high on my list of things to do, but the UI as it is right now feels dated. Using the dark theme is better, but things are still a little weird to use (why did i use bubble borders?)
• Thumbnails - I’ve been combating disk space issues for the longest time, but soon™ I’ll be able to overlook them. That means I’ll be able to thumbnail images, saving both bandwidth and load times for albums and the view page.
• Temporary File Storage - This is a VERY big maybe. I’ve always kind of disliked temporal file storage, but the amount of files I’ve seen that are simply “upload to share with friend, then forget about” are immeasurable.

The Important Part

And the biggest announcement I have - Catbox LTS (Long Term Support)! I’ve decided to take the plunge and personally invest in Catbox (as if i wasn’t already ;v). I’ve bought a 12 core, 24 GB RAM 16 TB Dell R420 to be used as Catbox’s primary server. As such, Catbox will be colocated! What does this mean? That means I get to drive down to LA to give someone my (very) expensive piece of equipment, and they’ll give it power and an internet connection! How will this affect the costs of running Catbox? In the long term, it will actually be cheaper than my current plan of hosting. You can see how much I’m currently paying on Patreon, but after moving to a colocation plan, the cost of Project Lain will go down, but the price of actual hosting will go up. The real winner here is my sanity. I won’t have to worry about disk space issues (by my calculations) for 3 years. Which by then I should be making 6 figures, and if i’m not i’ll pretty much kms. Jokes aside, the Catbox LTS will ensure your current files, and everything you upload in the future, will be safe and reliable.

As always, I want to thank not just my Patreon supporters, but users who have used Catbox despite the hiccups I’ve had. Catbox is my baby, and it’s my ultimate goal to see it through as a successful, simple file hosting platform. 

New Stretch Goals

A little explanation on my new stretch goals for Patreon:

Reaching $200 would offset both the current monthly cost of running Catbox ($100~), and allow me to purchase new server hardware, which I can then colocate at an Internap datacenter for $100/month, effectively matching my current costs, while giving me greater flexibility and power. I could roll Project Lain back a couple months, or maybe even fold it altogether.

God forbid I ever reach $400, but if we do, we'd be eclipsing even Mixtape. I really have no idea what I'd do at that point. I unfortunately don't have any new rewards for higher donation amounts yet, because I'm still trying to feel out my options. Bigger uploads? Custom sub-domains? Folders? idk man.

I also just want to thank my current patrons for their continued support, and for anyone considering becoming a patron, do it! Just a dollar from every active registered user would catapult us to new heights!

Second Goal Met!

ほんとに、ほんとにありがとうございました！

Reaching the second goal means that the server will be paid for completely. Which means a lot, especially now that I've started college and just dropped a lot on it. Don't worry though! I'm working on things as I type this, like better sorting, quicker page loads, some new features that will hopefully make sorting/controlling your files easier, and better documentation for the API.

But my biggest point, thanks to all of you for keeping me motivated!

First goal met!

Thanks everyone! Even covering half the bill means a lot to me!