Showing Stocking Tops

[zenobillo]

Is there any news on the recovery of the various hosts, especially ImageBam?

[berggeist38]

We can't do anything other than what the lyrics of this song say: "All we can do is sit and wait".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOAAS7G5hyk
_________________
Caution! I´ll become mighty angry, if I´ve seen too many christmas trees, little children and pets in 1960´s home movies!

[SimonP]

They're still showing the same message saying that they're "working around the clock to restore the site."

I asked ChatGPT to see what it could find out and it came back with:


"The outage appears to date directly from 21 July 2026, when Dutch police seized servers at a hosting company during an investigation into the Motherless website. The official Dutch police/Prosecution Service announcement confirms the server seizures, though it does not specifically name ImageBam. Independent image-host monitoring reports that ImageBam, Imgbox and ImageVenue all disappeared at the same time, apparently because infrastructure at that hosting provider was affected.

There has been a little progress:

ImageBam's main website is now hosted and responding again, but it still carries the same “serious disruption with our hosting provider� message and says it is building/restoring infrastructure.
Its DNS now points to infrastructure in Sweden, which strongly suggests they have re-hosted the front end somewhere new. The domain itself was also updated on 31 August 2026, so somebody is actively maintaining it.

However, the independent monitor specifically tests an actual previously hosted ImageBam image, rather than merely the homepage, and that image has remained unavailable. Uploads and historical images were still non-functional at its most recent substantive update.

As of 22 September, ImageBam itself has published no newer technical update, restoration percentage or target date that I can find.

So I wouldn't write ImageBam off completely — the operators clearly haven't abandoned the domain and have built replacement web infrastructure. But after two months, the worrying question is whether they can regain or reconstruct access to the old image storage. The police seizure could explain why replacing the website itself was comparatively easy while restoring millions/billions of existing files is not."


All we can do is keep our fingers crossed and pray, if you're that way inclined, that they manage to reload it all. It seems like they have a backup and as said above, it's going to take a very long time to reload it.

As I said elsewhere, the site and I are going nowhere. If we eventually give up waiting I'll build the site again on the main domain, leaving the old one in place in case it returns. The site is easy, finding storage to host the pictures much less so but I'm working on it.

Simon.