Imgur Goes Pro – Reddit’s Own Image Host Grows Up

Imgur, which was founded by Reddit user “MrGrim” for use in the Reddit community just added users accounts, both free and paid.

Imgur also today celebrated its one year “conception day”.

Imgur has grown enormously, and now serves some one million unique visitors monthly according to Compete. In a Reddit submission announcing the feature additions, MrGrim self reported that the website uses some two terabytes of data, daily.

From the post: “I worked for 14 hours a day … to bring them to you, and I could not be any more pleased about how they turned out. I tried to make everything as quick and easy as possible, and you can even setup your own galleries/albums if you need to share a set of images.

One thing may be worth noting before it surprises you: there are pro and standard accounts. Yeah, making a pro version was not really something I wanted to do, I’d rather just give you everything honestly, but I’m pushing 2TB a day and that’s…well, expensive to say the least and $20 a day from ads just doesn’t cut it :-/ I just want you to know that you are in no way required to sign up for pro, and absolutely nothing about the old service has changed.”

The service as had a rocket ship trajectory since its conception, as the Reddit community rapidly embraced the service. MrGrim, an active Reddit user, felt the pulse of the social sharing website, and built the image hosting service that they needed. The community had grown tired of services that consistently pulled images when traffic to that specific image reached a certain threshold, meaning the front page of Reddit would often be littered with broken image links.

Imgur keeps its statistics open, which can be viewed here. In the last twenty-four hours, the website has served some ten million images, throwing the Compete estimate into doubt. Imgur, put simply, is huge.

Pro accounts cost a stunning $2.99 monthly, and provide a laundry list of feature upgrades, which include unlimited uploading, enhanced thumbnail capabilities, and no advertisements.

Imgur is killing it, and seems to be only moving in one direction: up.