Hello reddit! We are vidgur.com. We are building the first anonymous video sharer. Separate from imgur, we will serve a different purpose. AUA

Did you add a "G" to the "vid" for name recognition? "img" is a pretty common abbreviation of 'image'. Vidgur doesn't make much sense.

I respect your opinion. Personally, I just thought it sounded cooler. :)

This must be a joke. Starting on a free shared hosting?!

Why not? Imgur started on a 5 dollar a month hosting plan..

Congratulations on making your own website and setting goals on yourself.

Save yourselves the trouble and categorize a preemptive cat-page.

Anywho, I've nothing smart to ask, so... on a daily basis, how often do you guys work/meet up?

Present, it is really just myself and two other friends. We are actually hosted on a free service, but Alan suggested for me to look into hosting with hostmonster along with a Cloudfare CDN. So far our only expense has been the domain name and we are looking for ways to raise capital, perhaps through donations. :)

Don't go through hostmonster.

It's very good, but for small sites. You will need a dedicated server for this.

Also, just a thought, you did take into consideration that video is expensive as fuck to host/server because the high bandwidth costs, so donations will probably not cover that.

I run online communities myself, the main one with about 240,000 USD income per year (only in ads, a bit more money from mobile). I have also worked on a project for a guy that was going to launch his own video community thing, so I know a lot of the problems we faced when working on that as well as what to expect.

Well for now, we are a small site and a small team, really just me for now. Since you have more experience with this than I do, perhaps you would be willing to help, that would be great. :)

... you are severely unprepared for this.

Journey of 1000 miles, mutha fucka. Give him time.

thank you :)

Might I suggest "123-Reg.co.uk" They are a UK company and the package I have with them currently is Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited storage space and a shit ton of other features. Highly recommended. Hell, if you want a taster I would be happy to pass over an FTP User/Pass for it.

That would be greatly appreciated! PM me.

Be very careful to check the fair usage policy. Especially with 1and1, unlimited actually means around 32GB. I've done video hosting and large site hosting myself, feel free to drop me a message if you think I can help.

thank you for notifying me of this.

You're on a free service? I'm not sure you appreciate the bandwidth/CPU required to host video. Your site is already down BEFORE you are actually hosting videos. (It reports "CPU Limit Reached".) You can't possibly be in any position to host videos on a large scale. You will need some substantial infrastructure in place to make this work. No dedicated servers or CDN in place? Other than making a webpage, this looks more like a pipe dream than a serious endeavour.

I hope you prove me wrong. It's an admirable goal and a good idea. Good luck, I'm rooting for you.

It wasn't supposed to be launched today or anything of the sort, so its ok. :) and thank you!

Donations could work. People have given money for lesser causes, so there's hope for you people yet!

I'm considering using your site when it launches, so I'm trying to decide whether or not to bookmark it. Concern is that it will display the 'days-until-launch' bit forever, or if it will direct/change into the site itself.

While I've surfed the web for a majority of my life, I've only ever seen the cover of the actual thing, so... :P

Well we wouldn't need much capital really, just enough to begin hosting on a CDN when the time comes. MrGrim mentioned it was only 25 per month, which is more than feasible for me to pay now. Also, since we are starting small, the hosting costs will be small, around 7 dollars a month. We will scale up slowly.

edit: But please do bookmark it! :)

um, not to shit on your parade but if you see any amount of usage you will be spending thousands on hosting costs. You will not under any circumstance manage to operate a video sharing website on free or shared hosting.

Average image on imgur: ~60kb? Average video people upload? 10mb?

also first anonymous video sharer? there are literally hundreds.

Well this will hopefully not be a problem if people decide to help. If we make it good and useful enough, then people will want to continue using it and donate to the cause(we hope!). :)

They won't, which is why no service like this (advertisement free, completely anonymous) exists. Not only do you have the issues of hosting illegal content (saying "sorry we don't store IPs lol" won't fly with the FBI for long) the costs will destroy you. The price difference between delivering an image 100,000 times and a video 100,000 times is... very different.

As MrGrim experienced when he first launched imgur you will have your website shut down by your host if you use one of the "unlimited" shared hosts within a few hours, from the Hosting24 Terms of Service:

Hosting24 Fair Usage Policy implies that if the client uses the resources of the shared server to the extent where he is negatively affecting other users hosted on the same server, the resources may be capped or in some cases, but not necessarily, respectable account may be disabled before client upgrades his account to a package more suitable for his needs or fixes the issues so the resource usage on his account stops to negatively affect other users on the same shared server.

the space on the hosting account cannot be used for: Backup storage, Online storage, File sharing services, Movie storage, Photo storage, Software storage, Copyrighted content storage, Illegal, Abusive or Offending file storage, Document Archives or any other type of Archive, File Backups (with the exception of a single cPanel backup generated from your cPanel), log files, etc. Hosting24 reserves the right to remove such files from the user account with or without notice to the client. Hosting24 also reserves the right to remove any single files larger than 1GB from the user account regardless of the content of the file with or without notice to the client. Hosting24 also reserves the right the clean up a user account by removing files which fall under the criteria of files that may not be hosted on Hosting24 accounts, if there are more than 250.000 files on a single account, with or without notice to the client. Hosting24 also reserves the right to disable the account which holds more than 250.000 files until the relevant shared hosting account is upgraded by the client to a vps service where such limitation is not applied.

So that's out, let's look at the alternatives, like using a CDN or file storage service. Let's use S3 as an example, assuming a video hosted on your service reaches the front page of reddit it will get at least 250,000 views possibly closer to a million but let's estimate based on 250,000. If the video is a 1 minute video from an iPhone it'll probably be 50mb, with compression (by your service) let's say it's down to 10mb.

10mb * 250,000 views = ~2.3 TB. The cost of 2.3 TB bandwidth with S3 (the storage service used by imgur) is just over $250. That's just one video from your service on the front page of reddit and you're now needing $250, what about 10 videos on the front page? What if people upload bigger videos? You see the problem right? This is why services have advertisements.

The desire to launch a service without adverts is noble, I run my own websites without adverts too when I can and only use adverts when the cost isn't maintainable however you've picked the absolute worst type of file hosting to use. Video files are huge compared to images which makes them very expensive to deliver.

Donations are few and far between for web services, I remember when I asked for donations on a website I ran that had over 1,000,000 unique users and we raised just over $2500, which was an awesome amount for us (paid the bills for a month!) but that was on a very "cheap" website to run, your costs are going to be 10x that with only 100,000 users...

If your site becomes the imgur for videos you're aiming for you'll never be able to pay for it. If you want to make this work you need to focus on revenue from the very beginning, you don't have the luxury that imgur had of being able to delay for a few months unless you're already independently wealthy :)

I am definitely not wealthy. This is not meant to be as huge as youtube. It's just really built for the reddit community, and to come in handy. Much like RES. :)

You're underestimating how big reddit is. A front page video on reddit will have at least 250,000 views, that will cost you more money than you can afford. If you do not consider revenue then you are wasting your time with this website because it will not be financially viable, at best you'll have to shut it down because you can't afford it, at worst you'll be faced with massive bandwidth bills that you can't afford and will personally bankrupt you.

You don't need to be in this to make great profits for yourself but you do need to understand what you're getting into. If you can't pay for your bandwidth then your website can't operate.

Very true. Hopefully we can get a hosting company to back us up on this and provide us with the means to host it.

Well this will hopefully not be a problem if people decide to help. If we make it good and useful enough, then people will want to continue using it and donate to the cause(we hope!). :)

hi. creator of RES here. I know a little bit about donation-supported software, so I've got a somewhat harsh truth for you:

if you're looking to sustain this site off of the goodwill of donations, forget it. your project is dead in the water.

RES is used by hundreds of thousands of users (in fact, over 1 million just on Chrome), and I make basically a completely negligible amount of money from it. We're talking like on a good month maybe $100-150 in donations aside from the occasional rare exception.

People just don't donate, and when they do, it's usually not much aside from a rare exception here or there.

For your project to succeed, you're probably going to need to come up with a way to monetize it other than donations / goodwill.

First, it is a pleasure to meet you and have you chime in on this. :) Yes I am worried and concerned about this, but if it means me having to take a small loan in order to keep the site running for users for a few months, I will. For now, I believe the site in its infancy will not require this.

I am sad to hear donations did not help. I guess we will have to look for other means. It would make me really happy if a hosting company would back us up. That would be splendid.

On a more personal note, I would love if we could work together to support vidgur on RES for the reddit community as one user pointed out.

On a more personal note, I would love if we could work together to support vidgur on RES for the reddit community as one user pointed out.

it's not out of the question... what sort of video format(s) are you planning on serving up, etc?

As many as we can. We are using an open source video player to run the videos, we really value using open source software.

If you want you can set it up on my VPS for testing. Its very fast and has a lot of space. I would totally host it for free until it starts to use a lot of system resources :)

I would love that. The site is already down! :(

Just PM me the domain that you plan on using and I'll set it up when I get home from work.

Well, it is vidgur.com. Let me know what you can do by PM. That would be great!

Haha I feel dumb now. I'll set it up in a bit and let you know :)

thank you, I appreciate it.

This is going to require insane amounts of bandwidth, and how do you hope to store all of the video submissions you receive? I can't imagine advertising income will be nearly enough to offset your server maintenance costs. Overhead hosting videos is insane compared to hosting images. Furthermore, video license violations will be through the roof, how do you intend to curate illegal content? Me and some friends drew up a proposal for a service along these lines 2 years ago, not sure how feasible it is.

Beyond insane, I heard google didn't make any profit from youtube for years, they were putting more than double its costs into it, something in the millions.

I intend to sort and take down the illegal content in the same way imgur does, by request.

Won't people use your site to upload copyrighted films?

This is a concern but at least we will respect the privacy of the user, even if it results in a takedown. The good thing is that a user could upload videos through tor and we do not request an email address or anything of the sort.

I video sharing website? How is this different from YouTube?

Well, for one, youtube does not allow certain kinds of content. Secondly, we will not have any limit on what can be uploaded. Thirdly, no registration process or email validation. We don't want users to go through a process, it would be a simple click, upload, and embed.

Ohh this is cool. Much simpler!

Yes! That is the plan, to make it as simple as possible. No barriers, no headaches. Just upload a video instantly. No verification required, no jumping through hoops. :)

I smell a successor to sexykarma

Does one get karma points in exchange for ..sex? :)

Haha no, I wish. I'd totally participate in that. Sexykarma.com is a video hosting site where people will upload videos of them doing [sexy] things and post it on /r/gonewildtube etc. it's a very shitty interface and will always go down. I think your creation will be the successor.

Edit: link is NSFW

Well we want it to be accesible to anyone, and the only way to see the NSWF content is to share it. It will not be grouped with regular content. It will be separate, much like here.

Also, a prize to the first person who figures out the obvious about our username.

The fact that it's Videogur, counterpointed to imagegur?

Also, are you going to work with the inline video viewer, try to make sure it works right, like imgur does with RES's inline image viewer?

Should be good for mirrors if nothing else.

Personally I love RES. I assume it could be done, but that is something the people who created it would have to integrate but I am certain it could be done. In the beginning phase, we would like to tailor it just for the reddit community. So this is an excellent idea. Thank you for suggesting it.

I imagine this new site would allow for the dissemination of live information to be a lot faster, and to a much larger audience. Are you prepared for the implications of this? What if someone started uploading child pornography or torturous videos?

People are fucking WACK out there. I wish you guys luck because I like the idea.

Thank you. That means a great deal.

So far as those kinds of content, I will not tolerate it. This is my biggest concern content wise, and we will ban whoever uploads material that involves either. Reddit will agree with me on this, but material that involves terrorism such as bomb making, or anything like torture does not and will not belong on vidgur. There are other sites that allow for that.

But not on vidgur. I feel very strongly about this.

Your name blows.

Sorry about that.

It's ok, I know not everyone will agree. :) That's also what they said about imgur in the beginning. Hopefully opinions change once users see the usefulness in the site, and not focus so much on the name. I don't use a service based on the name, but rather the service it provides.

[deleted]

Lol awesome, thank you! :)

Anyone who makes it easier for the lovely ladies of /r/gonewild to share themselves with us deserves our full support. http://i.minus.com/irjm5lVRgE52c.gif

Haha, thank you. :)

Have you ever hit a pinata?

Yes, and I am deathly accurate.

How do you plan to deal with warrants/copyright violations?
Will you just be removing the content since there will be no tractability back to the uploaded?
How many billions of terabytes do you have available for users at launch?

1.We will take down content by request, or if we are alerted. Certain things like child pornography or bomb making will have an automatic take down enforced. 2.We will just be removing content. We suggest users to use Tor or the like ;) 3.None. We are on a free hosting plan as we speak! We have no capital yet, but would like to do a donation link as suggested in order to raise enough to sustain the site for at least 2-3 months.

So your video site is better than YouTube because YouTube doesn't allow everything, but you ban and delete videos if people ask you to?

No, we will allow more than youtube but take down illegal content such as child pornography, etc.

So what kinds of content do you allow that YouTube doesn't?

For one, nsfw content. :)

What are your plans for revenue? Will you take a YouTube approach with ads everywhere or will you be more subtle with small banners and donations?

This for us is more of a necessity for the reddit community, it is not built with the intentions to make money. We want to be as non-obstrucive to the user as possible, which means little to no ads. We are hopefully going to be able to provide a good user experience, and perhaps offset hosting costs with a subscription model in the future.

P.S. I hate waiting 30 seconds to watch a video. I prefer if it was just a regular ad honestly so people could use adblock if they want (like me).

That's good no one likes those ads Also thanks for the response. P.s some one it down-voting all of your comments

Thank you and didn't notice that, I appreciate it. :)

how anonymous is your claim to be "anonymous" ?

We don't store any information on the user. No tracking, which is rare as most sites do it now. Although in the future, if we run do decide to include a banner ad, this would probably show up as google for example uses tracking to decide what information to project, but it will be easily taken care of with adblocker.

The videos is the only thing that is stored, no other information. You can upload a NSFW video, share it, and no one would know it is from you. It will come in handy for the gone wild community.

Also, we will not require users to sign up with email, etc. That is what will make us different is no validation, no sign up required. Not even an email, much like reddit. Although you CAN pick a username and password if you want.

[deleted]

No. NSFW videos will not show up on the main site. Much like on imgur, you can share it with your friends or on reddit, but it will not show up on the main page. The website is meant to be able to host any kind of video, save from certain disallowed content.

Get ready for tons and tons of gore and ridiculous amounts of porn.

I hope not. Reddit doesn't really show it, because this kind of content never makes the front page. Neither will it for us.

I don't want to be negative when you're clearly so stoked about doing this.

I can't help thinking the only people that would benefit from a completely anonymous video upload service would be people that are uploading things they shouldn't be.

If the only information you intend to store is the actual video, trouble will find you. Someone WILL try to upload kiddie porn. What are you going to do if the FBI gives you a subpoena for the user information?

What are you going to do when people upload libelous and slanderous videos? Because if the person being slandered can't sue the user, I assume they would sue you for hosting the video. And since you don't intend to charge, how will you cover your legal fees?

What are you going to do when children start using it to bully one another? This is a serious issue that is causing a lot of countries to update their laws, making it illegal to host the content.

I suppose my point is, if this website ever gets off its feet and gets nearly as successful as you would like it to, there are some problems you need to be prepared to deal with.

Either it won't get big enough to cover your legal fees or it will get so big that you won't be able to sufficiently monitor what is being uploaded.

I see it as a "screwed if you do (make it work) and screwed if you don't (make it work).

Just my opinion. Might want to consult an attorney before starting this.

If the FBI asks used to do that we would comply. I don't think anyone on reddit would go against me taking off that kind of sick content. I feel strongly about this.

will this be chock full of virus laden advertisement links?

not at all. I would love to run it just off of donations if possible. Much of the costs will be paid for with my own money. Donations will only make it possible to scale it up and keep it running.

For premium hosting, will you accept bitcoin as payment??

Yes, I certainly will!

Welp, guess it's been hugged to death already.

That's ok, it was just a launch page anyways so you weren't missing anything.

Check the source code and you will find a mention of reddit in there.

Checked it and wasn't able to find anything

Also, a prize to the first person who figures out the obvious about our username.

Well imgur was combining abbreviations for "your" and "image" (I think?) so my guess is vidgur is combining "your" and "video" but kept the 'g' as a shoutout to imgur.

I amended it. Should be there, in a meta tag labled proof. :)

Haha, well played :)

;)