I have some good news and bad news.

Firstly, the bad news. Absolutely no one adhered to our plea regarding hotlink abuse. For a network of image hosting services with no more than 6000 images we are transferring over 400 GB a day for external requests. Recently we mentioned that we developed a crawler that crawls external hotlinks for link backs. We all sat down and checked out the websites one by one. Almost 85% of the external images don’t link back (an improvement over the 90%) and using 400 GB a day - that is a good 12 terabytes a month for outside traffic with almost zero visitors on the gallery. What should we do, I wonder?

In the comming days we will be turning off our hotlink feature temporarily as we back up everything and prepare to further test ImgSTAR v3.

Now, for the good news. We are pushing back several of the features we had planned for v3 to v4 as this requires a complete rewrite. v3 will be up online in the coming weeks, there are some impressive features that you may love, BUT don’t worry I wont spoil your surprise.

In ImgSTAR v3, to counter hotlink abusers we will ban bandwidth aggressive domain names without a second look; however, this version will be so light-weight and feature packed that you will want to use its Image Page URL all the time. I certainly hope this upgrade will be a positive one for ImgSTAR. Trust me.

Update: We have decided to enable hotlink support for those who adhered to our hotlink policies and sent in visitors. If you happen to have such a site and the hotlink limitation is still active for your domain, then kindly email us using the contact form at imgstar.com or x3star.com. We apologize for the inconvenience.

If you noticed a “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” message then the geo targeted bandwidth block kicked in. It means that someone in your geo location used more bandwidth than reserved. However, geo location block is a beta feature that we did not intend to enable in this version of imgSTAR.com or x3STAR.com and have now been lifted.

As an added safety measure we have bought more bandwidth to fulfill the needs of the two sites.

We greatly apologize for the inconvenience caused by this.

We are happy to announce that the move has been successfully completed for both ImgSTAR and x3STAR. All the images, databases, and settings have been restored to April 20th 2008. However, before we get to the bad news on why the sudden move took place, let me share the good news first.

The new servers have much more dedicated ram, faster and powerful Dual Xeon Clovertown processors, RAID-10 hard disks, and industry standard server hardening which ensures ImgSTAR and x3STAR remain less susceptible to attacks. Most importantly the uplink bandwidth runs through 100mbps port ensuring faster loading of images and the websites, the problem though is the available bandwidth.

This was a tough decision for us to make regarding our bandwidth, between poor quality unmetered bandwidth on 2mbps port which would considerably slow down during peak hours or quality premium bandwidth which is limited but expandable with high overage charges. Our choice was limited premium bandwidth which would prove to be beneficial to those who do not abuse our services. Regardless we have started working on ImgSTAR v3, features will be disclosed later on - look forward to it!

Now on to the bad news, the services was taken down by our previous hosting provider on April 20th because of unpredictable spikes in resource usage and merciless bandwidth abusers exploiting our hotlinking feature. While it is exciting to be able to hotlink images we must understand that there is no such thing as free food, meaning we pay a lot of money month-after-month for bandwidth used up by hotlinks.

We have been keeping ImgSTAR ad-free, which will no longer be the case. However we promise to keep it professional and pop-up free.

While it would be better for us to take out hotlinking feature, we are willing to give it a second chance. Owing to the recent issues we have setup new set of hotlinking rules, kindly take your time to read through our Hotlinking Policy

Thank you for your support!

As of April 20th 2008 the ImgSTAR and x3STAR has been taken down by our hosting providers. Various reasons relating to bandwidth and unpredictable spikes in resource usage resulted in this scenario. Currently we are in the process of arranging better servers and more quality bandwidth for our move.

More details will be disclosed once everything is back to normal.

Hope everyone is doing well today.

If you have not already noticed it by now, check it out. You will see that the upload form has been improved so that form fields are more self-explanatory and elaborate. Better or not? I await your feedback!

On the other hand with countles visitors failing to read our Terms of Service and company policies, we were forced to add Checkbox confirmations. Now with each uploaded image you are legally bound to the ToS regardless of whether you actually read it or not. Offenses are taken seriously and you will be reported to your ISP for abusing our services.

Be careful, play safe!

Due to popular demand we have added two new categories namely Food & Drinks and Science & Technology.

Thank you for your continued support!

One of the tasks in the scheduled maintenance was converting the some old traces of ImgSTAR v1 database to fully complaint ImgSTAR v2 database structure. Unfortunately a problem in the tweaking procedure caused a good deal of image names and timestamps in the databases to mix-up associations, and some of them were assigned new timestamps and names. This cannot be rectified with a database backup because of the incompatibility between the two formats.

The services will not the suspended, however you may not be able to view some of the images. Proper solution has been worked out and all the images will be re-indexed in our database in the next three hours.

We greatly apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused.

All hosting services will be suspended for database and script tweaks between 01:30 PM and 03:30 PM (GMT) 4th of March.

The the services have become quite resource intensive, and difficult to sustain under our current hosting servers. We are evaluating options on moving to better servers in the near future. As this situation came unexpectedly it may take a little time to finalize the move.

This sheduled service maintenance will help tweak out several “bugs” that may reduce the resource spikes considerably!

Just out of development is our new service “Image Track,” allowing you to keep track, manage uploads and more. All you have to do is provide your e-mail (optional if you don’t want to track it) while uploading images.

1) Keeping track of images - You can keep track and manage your images. Sort images by category, date and access permission to manage easily.

2) Change access - You can change access permission of images. Share to Personal and vice versa.

3) Delete Images - Easily delete images that you no longer need.

4) My Album - This feature gives you and everyone easy access to your uploaded images that has Share access!

5) Get notified! - That’s right, every time any of your images are deleted due to violation of terms or policies, you get notified via e-mail with the image as attachment.

What are you waiting for? check it out http://www.imgstar.com/track

Feedback and suggestions welcome, we grow by your support. Spread the word around!

All hosting services will be suspended for database maintenance between 11:30 AM and 01:00 PM (GMT) 7th of February.

We will be back up before you know it, so hang tight during the process!