AnyHub

» see anyhub.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Charlie Somerville was a student in Melbourne and AnyHub was his. Matt Anderson, a designer in Ohio, did the artwork, which is why a free file host from 2009 opens on a cartoon sky of fat white clouds with green hills along the bottom. The whole interface was one small white panel floating in the middle of that drawing, holding a file field and an Upload button.

There was no account requirement. You picked a file and you got back a link, and if you did register you got a few extras for nothing. Files stayed up indefinitely unless they broke the terms of service, and the ceiling on a single upload was 10 gigabytes, which in 2009 was larger than most paid services would allow and considerably larger than anything a student should have been offering for free.

It ran on advertising and charity. The page carried Google AdSense and a PayPal donate button in Australian dollars, sitting next to the copyright line in a footer that also linked an upload leaderboard and an API. By 2010 there was a desktop uploader, and the interface had been translated into seven languages, two of them Estonian and Romanian, which tells you where the traffic had drifted.

~ the case file ~

~ the numbers on the stats page ~

AnyHub published its own totals at anyhub.net/stats, which almost no file host does, and that is why the ending has exact figures attached to it. On 18 November 2011 the site was holding 1,122,585 files taking up 2.81 tebibytes. That is a million files uploaded by strangers who never made an account, stored without expiry, paid for by display ads on a page most of them closed within thirty seconds of getting their link.

The economics of that are not subtle. The storage bill only ever goes up, one upload at a time, while the ad revenue depends on pageviews, and a file host's pageviews are mostly the one visit where the uploader collects a URL. Everyone after that is downloading, which costs bandwidth and earns nothing.

~ the part nobody announced ~

The banner went up in pink above the upload panel, in the second person, and the Wayback Machine caught it in mid-November: "AnyHub will be shutting down as of Friday, 18th of November. Please download any important data immediately, as it will be unavailable past that date." The archive's crawls agree with it. The site answered normally on 11 November, and by 19 November and again on 29 November anyhub.net was returning 404.

Then on 13 December 2011 it was back, serving the same upload panel with the same footer, and all the data was still there. Nobody announced that. Archive Team noticed it in a one-line update and the crawler kept finding a working file host into March 2012, copyright line quietly updated to 2012. After that the record goes quiet for eleven months, and when the next capture arrives in February 2013 the domain is a keyword farm selling cash advances and debt consolidation.

So this grave is dated to the announcement rather than to the silence, because the announcement is the only moment anyone running it said what was happening. The real ending came somewhere in that eleven-month hole, with no banner and no post, which is the ordinary way a free service run by one person ends. Archive Team had already taken a copy in November, so a million files that nobody paid to keep are still readable.

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