Yesterday, on the 20th of November 2023, the hosting of the filebin.net service was moved from Redpill Linpro in Norway to Hetzner in Germany. Shout out to Redpill Linpro for providing free hosting for 11 years!
Filebin was a hobby project that let me learn the HTML5 File API. The end result made it easy to share photos and videos with friends and family, which was difficult at the time for non technical people.
The first version of filebin.net launched on the 27nd of July 2012. It was hosted by Redpill Linpro for free, and they continued to sponsor hosting and bandwidth for 11 years.
Filebin has been rewritten a few times over the years. The source code for the current version is written in Go and is available in Github. It can obviously be self-hosted, if you want to.
The design goal for Filebin has always been that it should be possible for non-technical people to share and receive files online. Even as I write this in 2023, it is still surprisingly difficult to share files online for non-technical people. The user interfaces are typically bloated, photos are often compressed and file sizes have to be limited.
A service like this has the potential to be abused. Over the years, I’ve considered abuse mitigation features trying not to reduce ease of use for non-technical people. Some of the mitigations currently in place are:
All nice things eventually come to and end, and I anticipate that the service will have to shut down the day abuse mitigation work takes too much time.
The costs associated with the service have been limited to the domain name up until now, which has made it possible to provide the service with limited cost. The new hosting environment at Hetzner comes with a bigger cost, and I consider introducing a banner ad to offset some of it.
Up until now Filebin has been running on a small virtual machine with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of memory. The storage capacity has been limited to 200 GB. As of yesterday, the service is running on a dedicated physical server with 64 GB of memory and 3 TB storage capacity.