Anonymous Document Sharing Site Pastebin Surpasses 1 Million Members, Keeps Growing

Pastebin officially announced that they’ve surpassed 1 million registered members since the introduction of the login service two and a half years ago. The service allowed users to log in using social media tools and control the pastes they uploaded to the site. Members can also edit and delete pieces of information they post to the site. Users can still paste items anonymously.

Like many popular “paste” sites, Pastebin started out as a repository for code, snippets of text, and chat logs. Now, however, it has become a sort of clearinghouse for Anonymous, the group, and other groups intent on maintaining anonymity.

“About a year ago we added the option to create new Pastebin accounts via social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google which greatly increased the number of daily signups. Month over month we are seeing more traffic records, and we are currently serving about 17 million visitors per month,” said Jeroen Vader, owner of the site.

The site hosts 36 million active pastes and adds about 40,000 every day. “We have had some issues/headaches storing all this information, and at the same time making sure that the website stays lightning fast for our users,” said Vader. “For our developers it has been a huge learning curve, but we’ve got a pretty solid platform now that allows for a lot of future growth. Also we’ve had to deal a lot with DDOS attacks over the years, but with the help of some of our users, we’ve got a pretty solid system now to fight those kinda attacks.”

Vader is also working on what he is calling Pastebin 4.0 which will include a comment system, friends lists, a favoriting system, and a new layout. “That and some other ‘still secret’ features,” he said. “Those will be revealed once the new site is online.”

In the post-Snowden era, Vader is seeing more and more activity on the site.

“Every time something really controversial gets posted on Pastebin, it often results in a lot of media attention, which can result in a temporary boost in traffic. In the case of the Edward Snowden related items there were also a few days where traffic was noticeably higher than normal,” he said.

via TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/BanfbiXaYA8/