Questions and Answers

For how long will my files be stored?

Files will be removed if they have not been accessed for 120 days. When a file is downloaded the expiry time is reset to 120 days from the current day. This only happens when someone downloads more than 10% of the whole file in a single request. So if you have a 5 GB file the timer is only extended when you download at least 500 MB. The expiry timer is not updated when it was already updated within the last 24 hours.

File expiry is often seen as a downside of pixeldrain. But keep in mind that 120 days is a very long time. Roughly four months. This means that you can keep a file active for an entire year by only downloading it three times. Files which are only very sporadically downloaded can stay online indefinitely. All this time the file is using storage space and processing power on our servers, which costs real money.

If you would like to use pixeldrain for backups or long term storage, then the free plan is not the way to go. It is only meant for publicly sharing files. For real storage you should use the pixeldrain filesystem.

If you are (ab)using pixeldrain for free storage, you should not be surprised when the rules change at some point and all your stuff suddenly disappears. That would never happen when using pixeldrain’s filesystem.

What cookies does pixeldrain use?

When logging in to a pixeldrain account a cookie named ‘pd_auth_key’ will be installed. This cookie keeps your login session active. When you delete it you will be logged out of your account.

When you use the style selector on the Appearance page a cookie called ‘style’ will be set. This cookie controls the appearance of the website for you.

Pixeldrain does not use tracking cookies. We also don’t use fingerprinting to track our users. The only information that is saved is the information that you manually enter or upload.

How does the transfer limit work?

Pixeldrain has two kinds of transfer limit, the free limit for users without a subscription and the premium limit for users with a subscription.

Free

The free limit tracks how much you have downloaded from pixeldrain in the last 24 hours from now. The limit is not per day, instead it just keeps track of when you downloaded something and if it was less than 24 hours ago it counts towards your limit. In technical terms this is called a ‘Sliding window algorithm’.

The free download limit is only tracked per IP address. This means that if you are sharing an IP address with other people, like through a VPN, company network or a CGNAT network then the download limit is also shared. For free downloads it makes no difference if you’re logged in to an account or not.

When the limit is exceeded you can still download, but file previews are disabled and download speed is reduced.

Premium

The premium transfer limit works similarly to the free download limit. The differences are that the limit is bound to an account instead of an IP address, and the limit is per 30 days instead of 24 hours. The same sliding window system still applies. Any data that was transferred to/from your account between now and 30 days ago counts towards your limit.

Whenever someone downloads a file from your account it counts toward your transfer limit. If you want to limit how much of your transfer cap others can use then you can configure a limit on the sharing settings page.

If the person who downloads the file also has a premium account then their own data cap will be used first.

How does hotlinking work?

Hotlinking happens when someone downloads a file from pixeldrain without visiting the pixeldrain website. This can be through embedding media files on third party websites, or using download managers to download files directly.

Pixeldrain has a “hotlink protection mode”. This activates when we detect that a file is being hotlinked while neither the downloader nor the uploader of the file has a premium subscription. When this happens a CAPTCHA test will appear on the file’s download page, and the file can only be downloaded once the CAPTCHA is solved. When enough people complete the test the hotlink protection will be removed and the file can be downloaded normally again.

There are two reasons why we implemented hotlink protection:

File hosting services are often used to spread malware and other nefarious data, hotlink protection makes it significantly harder for people to abuse the service in this way. This was the original motivation for implementing hotlink protection, it has been very effective at preventing digital attacks.

Hotlinking also uses pixeldrain’s bandwidth and processing power without letting the user know that they are using pixeldrain. People who don’t know that they are using pixeldrain are less likely to purchase a premium plan. The download page is our primary source of new customers, we need to make sure it is seen.

Will premium improve my download speed?

No, the download speed is limited by the stability of the connection between your computer and pixeldrain’s servers. If free downloads are slow (and you have not exceeded your download limit), then premium will not improve your download speed. Premium only increases how much you can download, not how fast.

If you want to know your maximum download speed from pixeldrain’s servers you can use our speedtest. The speedtest will always download at the fastest speed possible, even if your download limit has been exceeded.

In order to keep pixeldrain affordable we use the cheapest hosting available. That means that the quality of our network is not always the best. It’s possible that your ISP has a bad connection to our ISP which can cause bottlenecks. We are always working on improving our connectivity.

My upload speed to pixeldrain is low. What causes this?

The simple answer is that there’s no way to know. There are lots of things that can affect upload speed. Pixeldrain’s servers are optimized to make downloads as fast as possible, because that is something I can control. With uploads, it’s your computer and your network which control the speed. I can’t change that.

Here is a list of things that can cause low upload speeds to pixeldrain. The list is ordered from issues on your end of the connection to issues on pixeldrain’s end of the connection.

• The software you’re using is not optimized for uploading.
• Your operating system is not optimized for uploading (this can be configured on Linux, check the guide below).
• Your router or firewall are misconfigured (I have seen issues where the firewall caused large delays in uploading because it was inspecting network packets). This can also explain cases where uploading to pixeldrain is slower than Google Drive for example, as Google Drive is such a popular product that many firewalls have built in exclusions for uploads to these servers.
• Your network provider is experiencing network congestion.
• The internet backbone is experiencing issues. This can happen whenever a submarine cable is destroyed in a miliary conflict for example.
• Pixeldrain’s network provider is having an outage. In order to reduce costs, pixeldrain uses the cheapest bandwidth available. For this reason outages can occur more frequently than with more premium connections.
• Pixeldrain’s caching servers are overloaded. When there is a large surge in traffic to pixeldrain, the cache servers can overload which causes things to slow down. You can see the status of the caching servers on the status page.
• Pixeldrain’s storage servers are overloaded. When this is the case you’ll see that the upload hangs at 100% progress for a while. Then the file was successfully uploaded to the caching server, but for the upload to complete it needs to be transferred to the storage cluster which can take time too.

Here are a few things that you might be able to change in order to make uploads faster:

Upload concurrency

Uploading more files at the same time often helps with increasing the speed, especially when uploading small files.

• Using FTP: With FTP clients you can often choose how many files you would like to transfer concurrently. In FileZilla you can set the “Maximum simultaneous transfers” to 10 in the settings for example.

• Using rclone: With rclone you can set the number of concurrent transfers with the --transfers 10 command line option. The option to disable HTTP2 (--disable-http2) also improves performance in some cases. This performance degradation is caused by a bug in the language rclone is written in.

TCP buffer size

When uploading files, your computer needs to keep the sent data in memory to verify that it was received on the other side of the link. The buffers used to hold this data are set to 16 MiB by default on Linux. Unforunately that is often too small when sending files over a high latency or high loss connection. The optimal size for these buffers can be calculated using the bandwidth-delay product formula. On pixeldrain servers the buffers are set to 256 MiB, this is a good value for high speed connections. You can increase the buffer sizes by adding these lines to /etc/sysctl.d/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=bbr
net.ipv4.tcp_shrink_window=1
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem=4096 65536 268435456
net.core.wmem_max=268435456
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem=4096 65536 268435456
net.core.rmem_max=268435456

After adding the lines, run sudo sysctl -p to apply the settings.

For information on what these do, and more network optimization tricks on Linux, refer to my network optimization guide.

Is pixeldrain available in every country?

I strive to make pixeldrain as accessible as possible to everyone. Pixeldrain does not block access from any country or network. Some countries have very restricted internet connectivity though. Pixeldrain has been blocked in some locations in the past and remains blocked in other locations.

The reasons for blocking pixeldrain are usually not clear. The countries that block access to pixeldrain rarely specify a reason. When a new block happens I always reach out to the ISP or government doing the blocking, but these entities are very hard to reach and they rarely reply. If your ISP blocks pixeldrain please call them and ask them why pixeldrain is blocked. ISPs always listen better to their own customers than website operators.

I have a survey that you can use to notify me when an ISP blocks access to pixeldrain. If you are having trouble accessing pixeldrain please fill out the survey.

Usually a website block can be circumvented by using a different DNS provider. The DNS provider is a service that translates website addresses (like pixeldrain.com) into IP addresses that can be used to connect to a website. These servers are usually operated by your ISP and can be used to censor or monitor your browsing.

Pixeldrain also has alternative domain names which might not be blocked. These are pixeldrain.net and pixeldra.in. Note that your session cookie is only valid for one domain name. If you use these alternative domains you will have to log in to them as well.

DNS Providers which don’t block pixeldrain

You can find a guide for how to change your DNS server on Google. Just search for ‘change dns server windows 11’, or whichever operating system you use.

Countries where pixeldrain is blocked

From the availability survey I have gathered that pixeldrain is currently blocked in the following locations:

• The Philippines (since 2022-03). I have reached out to PLDT about a dozen times but they never answer.
• Egypt (since 2023-03). I have tried reaching out to WE Telecom, but their website is not available outside egypt and their support address is bouncing my mails.
• Italy (since 2024-01). Tried reaching out to their communications office and police multiple times, never an answer.
• India (since 2024-04). Was unable to find a contact address anywhere.

If you live in any of these locations and are having trouble accessing pixeldrain please contact your ISP. I am ready to comply with whatever demands they have, I just want my website to be accessible again.

Statement regarding the Italy block

I have been working on the blocking situation in Italy, but there has been no progress. I have contacted every phone number or e-mail address I could find. All my e-mails are ignored and half of the phone numbers are out of service and the other half connect to (very impatient) people who don’t speak english.

I do not know what else I can do to make more progress on this situation. I have exhausted my options. Is there anyone in Italy or who speaks Italian who would be willing to help? I need to get in contact with the Polizia Postale, which has been blocking access to pixeldrain.com nationwide for well over a year now.

Not only are they blocking access to the site (which is bad enough), they are also spreading a terrifying and misleading image of what pixeldrain is being used for. This is seriously affecting the reputation of my business and myself. I’d really like to get this resolved. I am also willing to offer a financial compensation for anyone who can help me get this resolved. If you think you can help, please contact me on Discord. My username is Fornax.

Why can’t I find pixeldrain links on Google?

Files on pixeldrain used to be searchable with search engines if they were indexed. People often accidentally got files indexed which were not supposed to be public. For that reason I disabled search indexing on all pixeldrain files. This protects the privacy of pixeldrain users and helps with preventing information leaks.

How does the affiliate program work?

Pixeldrain’s affiliate program is a way to earn pixeldrain credit by driving traffic to pixeldrain. The way it works is that you send people your affiliate link, if someone accepts to be your affiliate then their active subscription will earn you pixeldrain credit. The affiliate program is opt-in and fully transparent. Users will always be notified when their affiliate account is updated. You can update who you are sponsoring by editing the affiliate name on your user settings page.

Here is a summary of all the rules and limitations:

• Each paying customer using your affiliate code will earn you €0.01 in prepaid credit every day. The credit is added to your account on a daily basis, as you can see on the transactions page.
• Sponsoring someone with an affiliate code does not cost you any extra money. The resulting fee comes out of pixeldrain’s pockets.
• You can only earn pixeldrain credit with the affiliate program. There is no cash out feature.
• When someone who is using your affiliate code cancels their plan, you will also stop receiving rewards.
• You don’t need an active subscription to gain credit through the affiliate program. You need a positive balance of at least €1 to activate the prepaid plan.

Some fun facts:

• You only need two affiliates to offset pixeldrain’s base subscription fee.
• Each sponsoring user is effectively equal to 125 GB of storage space or 500 GB of bandwidth usage per month.
• You cannot sponsor yourself.

Is there a clean pixeldrain logo I can use?

Yes, here’s a high resolution pixeldrain logo with text. The font is called Orbitron, it was designed by Matt McInerney and uses the Open Font License.

And here’s a vector version of just the icon:

Can I advertise on pixeldrain?

No.

Support

If you have more questions please try asking them in our support forum on Discord. Pixeldrain is a one-man operation, I can’t answer all the e-mails I get. By asking your questions on Discord there’s a chance that someone else can help you. I am also active on Discord myself.