https://blog.catbox.moe/

Financial Status

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 19:33:13 -0700

Update 8/17 - THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH. In just 8 days we’ve nearly reached the Patreon goal, and purchases of merchandise and cryptocurrency gifts have put us past the required funding for not just this month, but the next 3 months as well! The amount of generosity you guys have shown me has honestly touched my heart, and I am forever thankful. Catbox forever!

Heyoooo. It’s been a while again.

tl;dr - Catbox needs additional funding. Keep reading.

This post is going to have a more somber attitude than posts in the past, and it’s not one I’ve ever really wanted to make, but as Catbox has expanded, so has its costs. The operational costs for running Catbox per month for the last year have looked like this:

Datacenter Colocation: $971/month
Offsite Storage: $140/month
Cloud Server Providers: $40/month
Administrative Costs: $60/month

The large datacenter colocation bill is due to the fact that Catbox pushes an extreme amount of traffic. On average, Catbox pushes about 4 gbps, spiking up to 6 gbps.

This means I’ve had to acquire a 10gig internet uplink, which is not the cheapest thing to get. Additionally, Catbox is now hosting approximately 54 TB of content. As I’m sure many of you have encountered Lain, which is a project to basically offload inactive files to offsite storage, which can then be pulled back when a user requests. Catbox also utilizes various Cloud Server Providers (CSPs) to host external monitoring services and other servers. Finally, there are various administrative costs related to running Catbox, including email, legal paperwork, legal residences, and other small fees.

All of this has totaled into Catbox’s monthly expenses to come out to $1,211. As of posting this blog post, Catbox is bringing in $696 per month. This means I am personally footing the remaining $515. Additionally, all server/firewall upgrades and purchases have also come out of my pocket. When I totaled up all expenses for 2021, Catbox was $7,070 in the negative. This means I put $7000+ dollars of my own money to prop Catbox up. This is not tenable for the future of Catbox.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that Catbox needs additional funding to survive long term. Our patrons on Patreon have been wonderful, and without them there is no doubt that Catbox would have been forced to close. However, it is clear that Patreon by itself is not capable of supporting the current or future growth of Catbox. This leaves me with 4 options:

Monetize Catbox using traditional avenues (advertisements and sponsorships). This is not my first choice, and not something I’m entirely keen on. It would destroy the purpose and soul of Catbox.
Scale back on costs (primarily bandwidth). This would directly impact user experience, as cutting back to (for example) 5gbps would create a bottleneck and reduce speeds to a snail’s pace.
Open alternative avenues of income (paid accounts). This would involve a monthly plan that would give you additional features (existing features of Catbox would NOT change or be restricted). I am somewhat open to this.
Open alternative avenues of gift giving (cryptocurrencies). As of today, I have begun accepting gifts using Cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and Ravencoin. I have had quite a few people request this, and I see that now would be the time to offer this as an option.

You will of course notice that “Closing Catbox” is not an option on that list, and that’s because it isn’t. I would rather exhaust all other avenues of incoming before doing that, including traditional monetization. There are many people who have been using Catbox for the whole 7 years it’s been around, and I know what it would mean to them to lose their files.

So this is my public begging post - I know the current economic climate isn’t the greatest, and that many people have had to cut back on various things, including Patreon subscriptions, but given the traffic Catbox receives, if just 10% of users gave $5, we would be funded until the end of the year. So please, gift via Patreon, crypto, or if you want something more tangible, buy some stickers! I’ve created a new “Supporting” page to track Catbox’s monthly expenses and income, as well as new ways to contribute. I look forward to another great year, and again, thank you not just to Patrons, but to everyone who has continued using Catbox.

Happy 7th Birthday Catbox

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 01:41:17 -0700

Hi all,

It’s been a while since I’ve posted/made any news updates. Life’s been pretty busy for me, as I’ve been enjoying (read: dying) a full time job. Unfortunately this leaves me very little time to develop new features on Catbox.

None the less, Catbox remains. Thank you to all of my Patrons on Patreon for supporting Catbox despite this drought of development. There have been some background upgrades, including a firewall upgrade I did about 2 months ago, but nothing too interesting in the last 2 years :(

Thank you again to everyone who has supported Catbox throughout the years, whether that be through Patreon, stickers, or even just using it.

Comcast Xfinity blocking

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:29:47 -0800

Hi there.

It’s come to my attention that Comcast’s man-in-the-middle “Advanced Security” attack has been enabled by default for a large majority of their customers, and as such has blocked connections to files.catbox.moe.

You will need to disable their MITM attack by following the instructions here (obviously disable instead of enable): https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/using-xfinity-xfi-advanced-security

Thanks,

-cats

Regarding the recent slowness/500 Errors

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 20:17:18 -0800

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.

Additonally, I just wanted to thank everyone who has been a patron with me on Patreon. 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

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:58:49 -0700

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!

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 16:08:49 -0700

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!

TLS/SSL Updates

Thu, 21 Feb 2019 19:31:14 -0800

Updated Catbox’s encryption. Catbox now will only accept connections with TLS 1.2. Most users won’t notice a difference (besides your data being super more encrypted!). To see if you’re affected, check “Handshake Simulation” at the bottom of this webpage.

I have also enabled HSTS and OSCP Stapling. This means two things:

1. Catbox will now only accept connections via HTTPS. This was the case before, but I was doing nginx redirects. Now it’s done at a browser level.

2. OSCP stapling basically reduces the time it takes for your computer to make sure your connection to Catbox is legit, and makes the process of certificate verification more secure. If you want the finer details, you can read more here.

If you have any problems, be sure to send me an email and I’ll see if we can work out a solution.

Two Factor Authentication

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 00:40:41 -0700

I added two factor authentication using TOTP. That means you can now secure your account with your favorite authenticator app, like Google Authenticator or Duo Mobile! Make sure you keep your secret provided at the time of activation, in case you lose the app or your phone.

Colocation - It’s finally happening!

Wed, 30 May 2018 03:59:52 -0700

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!

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 02:17:46 -0700

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 backend 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 Patreon Stretch Goals

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 02:13:28 -0800

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!

October 2017 Statistics

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 01:07:23 -0800

Yeah so I fucked up the awstats thing and i’m really not interested in fixing it (it’s so fucking old) so I’m just gonna give overall site statistics from now on until i find a better log analyzer software (taking recommendations).

*.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 113,674
Unique Visitors: 66,530
Pages Served: 322,201
Hits: 5,180,665
Bandwidth Usage: 19,734 GB

Late/postponed statistics

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 01:17:09 -0700

statistics will be a little late/non-existant for July, because of the server change.

June 2017 Statistics

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 23:13:34 -0700

catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 26,862
Unique Visitors: 11,746
Pages Served: 125,364
Hits: 341,133
Bandwidth Usage: 12.7 GB

files.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 53,897
Unique Visitors: 40,751
Pages Served: 171,987
Hits: 3,833,662
Bandwidth Usage: 9,719.2 GB

qt.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 525
Unique Visitors: 459
Pages Served: 869
Hits: 2,266
Bandwidth Usage: 27.8 MB

nofun.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 562
Unique Visitors: 464
Pages Served: 637
Hits:2,132
Bandwidth Usage: 37.6 MB

May 2017 Statistics

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 11:29:00 -0700

catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 28,144
Unique Visitors: 13,217
Pages Served: 144,104
Hits: 399,269
Bandwidth Usage: 7.4 GB

files.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 66,004
Unique Visitors: 50,438
Pages Served: 155,342
Hits: 6,881,907
Bandwidth Usage: 10,907.5 GB

qt.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 685
Unique Visitors: 515
Pages Served: 1,229
Hits: 2,802
Bandwidth Usage: 33.6 MB

nofun.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 511
Unique Visitors: 417
Pages Served: 626
Hits: 2,083
Bandwidth Usage: 37.2 MB

Adpocalypse

Tue, 30 May 2017 01:26:46 -0700

edit: nevermind ads suck. 10% of front page views had ads. which means 90% of you blocked it. impressive tho

Oh noooo I’ve put ads on catbox!!!!!I’ll try to keep this short in order to stay to the point: I’ve put an ad on the front page of Catbox. It’s only for a week, and its to gauge revenue, because as it stands, Patreon isn’t covering server bills (which went up to $64/month $56/month). Currently, if you’re signed in to Catbox you won’t see ads, and that’s how I’d like to keep it (if i even keep these). However IF you’d like to support Catbox without donating directly, consider using Catbox without adblock enabled on it. sure I get like 0.003 cents per view, but money is money.Did I say I was going to keep this short? I lied. Here are some statistics about Catbox right now, just to put things into perspective: 668 GB of files across 329,402 files on the server 374 GB of files across 116,519 files on AWS (Project Lain) Just under 1,000 Registered users Approx. 17,000 unregistered (anonymous) users 1,100~ files uploaded daily Over 6,700,000 hits this month It’s kinda crazy right?

What people think I’m trying to do:

What I’m actually doing:

April 2017 Statistics

Mon, 01 May 2017 21:45:20 -0700

catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 24,127
Unique Visitors: 10,192
Pages Served: 127,496
Hits: 432,503
Bandwidth Usage: 17.3 GB

files.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 72,745
Unique Visitors: 54,577
Pages Served: 125,518
Hits: 2,901,337
Bandwidth Usage: 11,424.5 GB

qt.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 572
Unique Visitors: 321
Pages Served: 1,244
Hits: 2,547
Bandwidth Usage: 29.9 MB

nofun.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 233
Unique Visitors: 178
Pages Served: 365
Hits: 1,210
Bandwidth Usage: 24.4 MB

Happy 2nd birthday Catbox! + Support me!

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 23:20:38 -0700

Another year of fun, lolis, and some other stuff that I can’t remember!

Thanks to Pettankon for the art

And with our second birthday comes something new: Catbox on Patreon! That’s right. You can now support the site through Patreon. You’ll even get little things out of it.

I took all your poll results and considered all the options. You guys had a lot of insightful/neat ideas for how to keep the site going. Here’s the percentage breakdown of the poll

12% - Ad Banners through Adsesne
21% - One time donations
9% - Nothing/Other
16% - Reoccuring donations
18% - Special Ads self-brokered
24% - Account Upgrades

You might wonder why I didn’t go with the most popular option. Its mainly because the time it would take to create the upgrades, the pricing model (monthly, yearly, onetime??), and a bunch of other things would have been simply too complex for right now. I’m happy with the site’s features as it is. Maybe some time in the future I’ll change the patreon rewards to give actual Catbox rewards (html file hosting, larger uploads), but for now, it’s going to stay separate from the actual function of the site. I don’t think I’d be able to handle larger file size uploads (space is already tight as it is), and HTML file hosting would require a lot of coding magic, and I’ve been a little busy lately.

Anyway, here’s to a great year, and hopefully many more!

March 2017 Statistics

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 01:36:47 -0700

catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 24,971
Unique Visitors: 10,872
Pages Served: 129,130
Hits: 321,075
Bandwidth Usage: 14.2 GB

files.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 51,046
Unique Visitors: 41,136
Pages Served: 76,761
Hits: 3,026,235
Bandwidth Usage: 9,921.5 GB

qt.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 612
Unique Visitors: 345
Pages Served: 1,217
Hits: 2,777
Bandwidth Usage: 33.6 MB

nofun.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 195
Unique Visitors: 131
Pages Served: 454
Hits: 1,386
Bandwidth Usage: 31.9 MB

February 2017 Statistics

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 05:11:02 -0800

catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 22,994
Unique Visitors: 9,521
Pages Served: 114,700
Hits: 264,269
Bandwidth Usage: 6.3 GB

files.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 35,510
Unique Visitors: 26,994
Pages Served: 74,353
Hits: 2,512,054
Bandwidth Usage: 5,390.3 GB

qt.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 659
Unique Visitors: 396
Pages Served: 1,291
Hits: 2,723
Bandwidth Usage: 32.4 MB

nofun.catbox.moe

Total Visitors: 209
Unique Visitors: 147
Pages Served: 349
Hits: 1,298
Bandwidth Usage: 27.3 MB

me_irl