I run a file sharing / content delivery platform called pixeldrain: https://pixeldrain.com The system serves 4 PB of data to 60 million visitors per month. I have served 30 PB and 700 million file views since I started tracking usage somewhere in 2018. I'll go from front to back: - Most of the frontend is plain HTML, CSS and JS. I have started transitioning some pages to Svelte. I like this framework for its speed an…
Thanks for sharing these insight & very impressive stats! Just few questions I have: - What is your total infra cost? A cost split between storage & servers would be an awesome insight - Since how long you have been running this service? - How did you keep up with the infra cost before breaking even?
My content delivery servers cost me about €2000 per month. I experiment a lot with different providers to drive cost down here. My storage servers are €800 per month. For that money I get about 500 TB of usable capacity (all my servers run raidz2). And then I spend about €150 on database servers. My Constellix DNS bill is €50 per month, and Mailgun is €5.
So about €3000 / month worth of infrastructure.
I started working on pixeldrain in 2015 during lunch breaks at school. The original version was a Spring Boot app with MariaDB. I had a lot of performance problems here. My use case doesn't really fit in the CRUD API use case. I need tighter control over my connections and threads. That's why I switched to Go.
I run ads to pay for the servers. It's really hard to find advertisers for file sharing services because they don't want to run ads in controversial content, and that's what file sharing sites are mostly used for. I have to resort to working with some really shady companies. Because of this I balance my ads so that they generate just enough revenue to pay for the servers.
Eventually I would like to turn some profit though. That's why I'm trying to shift from file sharing to content delivery.