Kephost.com

» see kephost.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Kephost started in 2008 as a Hungarian one-click image host, the kind of service that exists because forums will not let you attach a photograph. You dropped a file on it and got back a link to paste into a thread. There was an account system if you wanted one, and a Facebook comment module embedded under every picture that almost nobody ever used, because nobody goes to an image host to have a conversation.

It was redesigned nearly every year and changed its internal URL scheme more than once, which is normally how an archive gets destroyed by its own owner. Kephost did not do that. From the 2010 redesign onward the older pictures stayed reachable, so links posted in 2011 still resolved in 2017. Then Kepfeltoltes.hu went away, its traffic had to land somewhere, and by 2017 Kephost was taking close to two thousand uploads a day and was the biggest thing of its kind in the country.

Underneath it ran Chevereto version 3. Picture pages were kephost.com/image/ and then a short base 62 identifier, with a capital A acting as a leading zero, so Aw and AAw resolved to the same image. The file itself sat at a path built out of the upload date, followed by whatever the uploader had called the file on their own computer. That last detail means a Kephost URL often carried somebody's original filename out of their Pictures folder and into a public thread, for ten years, without anyone thinking about it.

~ the record ~

~ five days ~

On 22 April 2018 registered users got a message headed "Bezár a KepHost.com". It said the site was expected to close on 27 April, told people to save anything they cared about out of their profile because it would not be available afterwards, and then added one more line: the site is for sale, send offers to [email protected]. The eviction notice and the sales listing were the same five sentences.

Nobody bought it. By 20 June 2018 kephost.com was serving a generic marketing site, and the images were not behind it. Today the domain does not answer at all.

~ the gap in the archive ~

Archive Team had been working the site for years and the numbers are unusually precise. Four crawls between 16 May 2014 and 31 March 2017 pulled 291,039 images, then 135,604, then 194,603, then 131,347. That is 752,593 pictures and 875 GiB. The upload rate those crawls measured climbed from 431 a day to 1,960 a day across the same three years.

Everything uploaded before May 2014 is gone, and so is everything from the last thirteen months. The reason for the second gap is written on the wiki in plain language. In July 2017 the site disabled image browsing, which removed the only efficient way to discover what existed, so the volunteers decided to wait until the library had roughly doubled before running again. The planned date moved from December 2017 to summer 2018. Beside it, struck through, somebody has written: Too late.

This is not a Turkish story, but the shape is one I recognize from the other direction. I spent years on frmtr and donanimhaber with a hardware list in my signature, and a forum thread from that era is held together entirely by links to whatever image host was cheap that year. The damage a host like this does on the way out lands somewhere else, in threads on other people's servers, in a language its owner never had to read. Hungarian forums have been full of broken boxes since the last week of April 2018.

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