What is the reason for launching a new website?#
Nova.storage was forked from Pixeldrain to fix some problems with the original site. The reasons are explained here:
Payments#
Pixeldrain originally grew out of an image-sharing service. For this reason it allows anyone to upload anything. This created a special kind of economy which I didn’t foresee when I started developing the service. Uploaders upload their files for free, and downloaders pay to download the content which is available.
Turns out payment processors hate this model. Pixeldrain has been deplatformed a couple times. First Mollie stopped providing their services without providing any reason. Later PayPal closed my account as well. I can’t sleep well not knowing whether my revenue streams will still be there when I wake up.
With Nova I’m turning the economics around. The owner of the files pay for everything. And they will be held responsible for any abusive behaviour as well.
Technical basis#
Pixeldrain is quite an old system at this point. It has been in development for well over ten years. Pixeldrain has survived a bunch of database migrations: First from MySQL to CockroachDB, then from CockroachDB to SyllaDB, and right now we’re migrating from ScyllaDB to Cassandra. Because of all these migrations the database schema is not ideal. There are a bunch of inefficiencies which I wanted to address, but I couldn’t because it would mean temporarily taking the website offline.
Nova is a copy of the Pixeldrain codebase with all the legacy stuff removed and all the techical debt resolved. The result is a system which is much nicer for me to work on and it should be more stable as well.
Clean slate#
Over the years, Pixeldrain has seen its fair share of abuse. While I always took care to comply with all the laws and regulations, the site still got a bad reputation in some regions. Despite my moderation efforts, and always cooperating with law enforcement, Pixeldrain was still banned in Italy in 2024 and in Spain in 2025. I have tried to get in contact with these governments to get the issue resolved, but my pleas have always fallen on deaf ears. At this point I see no other option but to start over.
What are the functional differences between Nova and Pixeldrain?#
- On Nova, you can’t share files for free. In order to create public pages you need an active subscription.
- On Nova, there is also no daily download limit. Downloads are always paid for by the uploader of the file. If the uploader can’t pay, the file is not available.
- On Nova, free accounts have a storage limit of 50 GB, and a download limit of 50 GB/month. These limits don’t exist on Pixeldrain. The free plan on Nova is just meant as a demo for the paid product, it’s not for serious use.
- On Pixeldrain, resported abusive content is automatically removed and the uploading account is automatically banned. On Nova all abuse cases are manually reviewed. In order to keep this manageable there is a minimum deposit of €10 for premium accounts, and banned users are not eligible for a refund.
- On Nova, everything revolves around the filesystem. There are no legacy systems for sharing files like Pixeldrain’s My Files or My Albums pages.
I know it sounds like Nova has a lot more restrictions than Pixeldrain, in a way that’s true. But with these new rules it’s possible for me to provide a much more stable service. If you don’t agree with this you’re free to keep using Pixeldrain. I have no plans to shut it down. The services are different enough that they can operate separately without competing with eachother.
If Nova ever becomes a huge success, and if I don’t see a point in Pixeldrain around anymore (big ‘if’). I might choose to shut down Pixeldrain, or sell it to some other party.
How does the egress traffic limit work?#
Egress traffic is counted whenever one of your files is downloaded. It doesn’t matter who downloads the file, it can be you or someone else, the traffic is always counted for the owner of the file.
When the traffic limit on your account is reached, nobody can download your files, not even you.
The egress traffic limit is a 30 day sliding window. This means that any download in the last 30 days (counted as 720 hours) counts toward your limit.
There is no reset date for the limit. This is done to prevent load peaks. If we would, for example, reset the limit on the first day of the month, then we would have a huge traffic peak on the first day of every month. Our servers most likely can’t handle that. By using a 30 day sliding window you get to use the same amount of traffic each month, but we avoid having a reset date.