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Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

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Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#191

Post by sweca »

scharman wrote: post #189
sweca wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand where you're coming from. Most people do not have 100 GB of media on hand, nor will they probably in the next 5 years. As a result, it's basically unlimited from a reasonable usage standpoint. Before adding a 100 GB cap, I actually experimented with having "unlimited storage", but this can go wrong in many ways. I've spoken to companies in the VPN and cloud storage industries and having unlimited anythin…

Looks like a great service - kudos! Hope it succeeds and competes with imgur!

Thank you! I'm trying my best.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#192

Post by mrbluecoat »

scharman wrote: post #187
shrubble wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can, right now, go find dedicated servers with 1gbps port that will deliver continuous 800Mbps of traffic 24x7, for $35/month. Bandwidth is not as expensive as people think.

You’ve intrigued me! Can you provide a link to such a hosting option? I’ve got some side projects I’d like to explore! Thanks in advance

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#193

Post by dbmnt »

tracker1 wrote: post #141
devnull212 wrote: post #14

Congrats on the launch! But, something that stops me from using a number of services is the sale of fixed size plans where I'll typically either under utilize them (e.g. do I have 100 GB of screenshots to upload) or I'll over utilize and might not have an upgrade path immediately available for more storage. I tend to toss my photos in backblaze or S3 for this reason -- UX is severely lacking but I pay for what I use.…

I've really liked Cloudflare's R2 for this usage myself. YMMV of course.

How do you upload content to R2? Someone else mentioned Dropshare, but it is iOS/macOS only. I need a cross-platform solution.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#194

Post by shrubble »

scharman wrote: post #187
shrubble wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can, right now, go find dedicated servers with 1gbps port that will deliver continuous 800Mbps of traffic 24x7, for $35/month. Bandwidth is not as expensive as people think.

You’ve intrigued me! Can you provide a link to such a hosting option? I’ve got some side projects I’d like to explore! Thanks in advance

Wholesaleinternet.net is just 1 of many places.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#195

Post by _rwo »

shrubble wrote: post #186
fragmede wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one ever starts these things with plans to shut them down, the question is how much money do you have for this right now, how much money is it burning per unit of time, and how long will that last if no one pays for a paid plan. I'm not asking you to answer those questions, but pointing out the reality of the economics of the situation. If an image goes viral, can you pay a 10x or 100x hosting bill? For how long?…

I can, right now, go find dedicated servers with 1gbps port that will deliver continuous 800Mbps of traffic 24x7, for $35/month. Bandwidth is not as expensive as people think.

> Bandwidth is not as expensive as people think

Now we only need to explain that to AWS folks

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#196

Post by conductr »

phito wrote: post #93
fsckboy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2016, Imgur raised $40 million in funding from investors, valuing the company at around $500 million. In 2021, Imgur was acquired by the media company, MediaLab, for an undisclosed amount, reportedly around $200-300 million. Alan Schaaf, the CEO and founder, reportedly owned around 40% of the company at the time of the acquisition, which would have netted him a significant amount, estimated to be around $80-120 mi…

So the goal is to make another unsustainable business, make everyone use and love it, then sell it to someone who will make it uterly shitty with the hopes of squeezing at least a bit of money out of the people who now rely on it, before it inevitably dies?

Imgur has lasted a good while.

I’d argue that having a service that exists in any form is a success. The fact it’s used so heavily despite your opinions and being loaded with ads means people value it and are better off than if it never existed. If the creator here could create the same but with no monetary upside directly, even just having the notoriety and putting it on his resume would translate to dollars indirectly. It’s a side project, chill.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#197

Post by conductr »

jml78 wrote: post #7

Congrats, it looks great, love that you have Linux app support. Question, have you done the business analysis to know how long you can afford to run the system when giving away 500MB? Even your paid model seems really inexpensive. Do you have enough margin to immediately not go broke? I am not trying to throw shade, I am just curious because it almost seems too good to be true since you aren’t running any ads and you…

This type of analysis is kind of pointless because the chances of the key assumptions being correct are almost none. How many free vs paid users will sign up? How much resources will they actually consume? The answers aren’t known until you test the market and probably change over time too.

That said, if he’s just bootstrapping this as a hobby with low overhead these prices are just fine. He probably actually makes a good profit once his user counts climb a bit. This type of service can be easy to keep afloat in these prices is my gut feeling and that’s probably good enough.

Besides there are some easy solutions to an emergency situation. Raise prices. Stop offering free plans. Change the resource limits. Etc. so much he can do before going broke.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#198

Post by GrumpyNl »

sweca wrote: post #36
GaiusCoffee wrote: post #35

I have always wondered how "hosting" sites deal with malicious actors, like sharing of copywritten stuff (like movies), xxx stuff or worse (cp). Is there content moderation at the backend of Horizon?

For privacy reasons, there's no scanning. I rely on user reports to determine whether to take content down.

Get ready for pull request from all kind of organizations. We had something similar a few years ago, when it became a bit populair, it got bombarded with all kind of illegal stuff like cp. We had a contact by the police to notify them when to report the illegal stuff. We stopped it because we had to implement continues monitoring of what was uploaded.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#199

Post by drewdevault »

efilife wrote: post #115

Where do you host it? I see that nsfw is allowed, what vps does allow it?

From the terms of service:

> Please be aware that there may be certain adult or mature content available on the Website. Where there is mature or adult content, individuals who are less than 18 years of age or are not permitted to access such content under the laws of any applicable jurisdiction may not access such content. Certain areas of the Website and Services may not be available to children under 18 under any circumstances.

Ironic given that the creator is only 17 himself per the original post. Having run a site like this before, you can expect to get some awful stuff uploaded before long, up to and including CSAM. Not sure I can trust a minor to moderate this stuff and push that "report" button in good conscience knowing that a minor will have to view the material to make the call.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#200

Post by ronyba »

sweca wrote: post #38
loteck wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy and security here are being commingled under the banner of AES encryption at rest, which is apparently disabled by default. I always wonder, if your marketing pitch involves security features, but those features are off by default, aren't you technically pitching your lack of security?

Encryption at rest is disabled by default because many users do not want to keep track of all of their encryption keys, which are not stored by Horizon when that setting is enabled. There are also other security features, like end-to-end encryption for pastes, but like mentioned before, not everyone wants to lose the ability to preview their content in the dashboard. By giving the user a choice, I can cater to both c…

Have you done an Independent security review of these features? What's your CRS score? Do you have CVE fix SLA in place? All these features are good if this was. 2000 website but a single vulnerability in any one of the vendors of your tech stack will compromise your users
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