Infostore.org

» see infostore.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Infostore.org started in May 2004 as a photo host. Oleksiy Mas wanted a place where Ukrainians could put their pictures, and the mascot he gave it was a cartoon penguin in a red hat holding a camera. Within a couple of years the photographs were a rounding error. It barely restricted what you could upload and getting a file back out of it was trivial, and its servers sat inside UA-IX where every Ukrainian provider peered, so it was fast for everyone in the country and slow for everyone outside. That combination turned it into the single biggest pile of media files in Ukraine.

The investor behind it was Oleksandr Olshansky of the Internet Invest group, who later called Infostore the first truly successful Ukrainian project of its kind. The technical shape was unusual for a file host: rather than one index with a search box, it let each user build their own page and link those pages to each other. Olshansky described it as one front page with everything past it made by the users. That structure is why the site felt less like a locker and more like a neighborhood.

On 4 December 2008 officers from the Ministry of Internal Affairs arrived at the company office on Tverska Street in Kyiv and stayed for twelve hours. They took the equipment. Volia, the cable provider whose data center on Kykvidze Street held the servers, hired lawyers after its own staff were refused entry to its own premises. The stated grounds were pornographic material sitting on infostore.org, uploaded by the site's own users under rules that placed responsibility on whoever uploaded it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a raid means when the servers are the company ~

There was no shutdown notice and no wind-down window. The machines went out the door and the service stopped existing that afternoon, with every user page and every file anyone had ever put there going out with the hardware. Nothing was handed back in a usable form. A file host has no business left once its disks are in an evidence room.

~ what grew back ~

Eight months later, in the summer of 2009, EX.UA appeared. Ivan Savchenko, who had come out of the Infostore project and worked with Mas for years, was behind it, and it occupied exactly the space Infostore had left empty. EX.UA then got its own raid in January 2012 and its own eventual death, so the Ukrainian press has spent fifteen years writing the same story twice with different nouns.

Mas himself kept building for another decade, through iForum and mail.ua and a long list of other things, and died in October 2021. The obituaries in Ukrainian tech press all lead with Infostore, which tells you which one mattered.

~ the distance ~

By 2008 I was on TTNet broadband in Turkey and downloading from whatever the Turkish forums were pointing at that month. Infostore was a Ukrainian-language site serving a Ukrainian peering exchange, and the entire reason it was fast was that its traffic never left the country. That is also the reason nobody outside it noticed when it stopped. A national file host is invisible from one border over, right up until the police arrive and it becomes a national news story you still do not read.

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