What is pixeldrain?
Pixeldrain is a file sharing website built for speed and ease of use. You can upload files you want to share online to our servers and we will hold on to them for at least a month. During this time anyone with the link will be able to download your files. Pixeldrain is built to be as fast as possible, so you don't have to do any unnecessary waiting when downloading files.
Files can be uploaded by clicking the big green upload button, or by dragging them onto this page from your file manager.
If you uploaded multiple files at once you can also create a list, which is a collection of files with one single link. Like a photo album, a music record or a video compilation. Click the 'Create list with uploaded files' button after your uploads are complete. The files will be saved in the order you uploaded them.
Getting more out of pixeldrain
By purchasing a subscription you support pixeldrain on its mission to make content sharing easier, safer and faster for everyone. The standard subscription plans use Patreon for payment processing. Check out our prepaid plans if you would like to pay using cryptocurrencies.
Pixeldrain uses SI standard units for measuring file sizes. If you are using Microsoft Windows your files may appear smaller than they actually are.
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Prepaid plans
You you need more bandwidth or storage space there's also prepaid plans. For prepaid we charge a base rate of €1 per month, the rest of the charges are usage based. We charge €4 per TB per month for storage space and €2 per TB for bandwidth usage. We accept Bitcoin, Lightning Network and Dogecoin payments.
If €4 per TB of storage is too much we also have plans with cheaper storage and file expiry enabled. Your files will not expire as long as they generate traffic, so this can be a viable option if your files are accessed often.
To use prepaid you need to register a pixeldrain account. After logging in head to the transactions page to deposit your coins.
Files on pixeldrain have to expire eventually. If we didn't do this the website would keep growing forever and we would run out of money pretty quickly.
Unlike most other sharing sites pixeldrain uses a postponing system for expiring files. When a file is freshly uploaded it gets 30 days by default (90 days if you have the pro plan). After these 30 days we will check when the file was last viewed. Files which are regularly viewed could still bring new users to the platform, it would be rude to show these people a File Not Found page. So if the file was viewed in the last 30 days we will simply postpone the next check a month. If the file was not viewed however it will immediately be removed.
Views are only counted when someone visits the download page in a web browser. This makes sure that users can see that the file comes from pixeldrain.
This way we can minimize dead links, and you won't have to tell your friends to 'hurry and download this before it expires'.
Paying for bandwidth is the most expensive part of running pixeldrain. Because of this we have to limit what can be downloaded and by who.
Normally when you view a file it's on pixeldrain's file viewer. The file viewer is the page with the download button, the name of the file and a frame where you can view the file if it's an image, video, audio, PDF or text file.
Rate limiting
It's also possible to link directly to a file instead of the download page. This circumvents our advertisers and branding and thus we lose money when people do this. That's why I added 'rate limiting mode' to files. This mode is enabled when a file has been downloaded three times more than it has been viewed through the file viewer. When rate limiting mode is activated a file cannot be downloaded through the API, the request needs to come from the file viewer page. On the file viewer you will see a CAPTCHA to fill in when you click the download button.
More information about Hotlinking on Wikipedia.
Hotlinking with a Pro subscription
When you have a Pro subscription you will get a monthly data transfer limit for all the files on your account combined. Files you download from pixeldrain are subtracted from the data cap. If you have Bandwidth sharing enabled your data cap is also used when other people download your files.
In principle there is always someone who pays for the bandwidth usage when a file is being downloaded:
- If the person downloading the file has a Pro subscription their data cap is used.
- If the person who uploaded the file has a Pro subscription and Bandwidth sharing is enabled on their account, then the uploader's data cap is used.
- If neither the uploader nor the downloader has a Pro subscription the download will be supported by advertisements on the download page.
The bandwidth cap on your account is a 30 day rolling window. This means that bandwidth usage will expire 30 days after it was used. Your counter will not reset at the start of the next month.
When a list of files is downloaded with the 'DL all files' button each file in the resulting zip file will be counted separately.