Over 1,600 Users! WebP Cloud Services Dynamics for 2025

Happy New Year, everyone! This is Nova Kwok.

Around this time last year, we shared a blog post titled “More than 400 users, new watermark effect and new outlook - WebP Cloud Services 2024 Updates” reflecting on WebP Cloud Services’ performance in 2023 and looking forward to 2024. Before we know it, a year has passed, and it’s time for a new review and outlook.

As with last year’s blog post, let’s first briefly introduce the services currently offered by WebP Cloud Services!

• WebP Server Go: Our open-source program that began on 2020/02/09, originally developed by myself and Benny Think using Go to provide users with dynamic image optimization capabilities without manual image processing. There are many stories behind the idea, including:

  • Making Site Images Load Faster - Introducing WebP Server for Seamless Image Conversion to WebP
  • Seamlessly Switching Personal Website Images to WebP | Potatoes Are Not Tasty
  • Letting Images Fly with oh-my-webp.sh! | Reimu’s Blog
  • Many related stories can be found at https://docs.webp.sh/related_articles/

• Public Services: Launched on 2022/01/23, it is a reverse proxy service for Gravatar/GitHub Avatars optimized with WebP/AVIF, aiming to optimize avatar access speeds globally and additionally provide a usable Gravatar service for users in mainland China (since gravatar.com is DNS polluted and cannot be accessed directly in mainland China).

  • Public Services - Fly: Launched on 2023/12/22, this is a derived service from Public Service that allows users to experience some functions of WebP Cloud without registering for WebP Cloud.

• WebP Cloud: Launched on 2023/05/21, it is a CDN with image optimization and processing capabilities, initiated after receiving feedback from users wanting a more generalized service (not just limited to avatar reverse proxy like Gravatar). Benny Think, Tuki Deng, and I quickly agreed to start this project, marking our first pilot for a commercial SaaS product.

WebP Server Go

As of the writing of this article, our open-source component WebP Server Go has received 1,882 stars and 181 forks, showing modest growth compared to 1,557 stars at this time last year, indicating insufficient investment in this open-source project (as our main focus has been on WebP Cloud-related components).

In 2024, our main modifications to WebP Server Go include:

• Backporting features such as Meta from WebP Cloud to the open-source product. “WebP Server Go 0.13.0 is Released”
• Adding the --verbosity flag to control log output levels. https://github.com/webp-sh/webp_server_go/pull/375
• Supporting MAX_CACHE_SIZE in the configuration file to meet several user requests. https://github.com/webp-sh/webp_server_go/pull/344
• Supporting JPEG XL format as an output format. https://github.com/webp-sh/webp_server_go/pull/321

Public Services

Public Services continues to maintain a 100% SLA of steady operation in 2024, with a new major site added to our roster being the Brazilian news website - areavip.

As of the writing of this article, our public service has optimized and outputted 216,671,550 images (totaling 1,960,173.51 MB).

GitHub Phishing

On 2025-02-11, we received an email from Netcraft, claiming that our domain https://avatars-githubusercontent.webp.se/ was involved in a phishing attack:

Hello,

We have discovered a phishing attack on your network.

hxxp://avatars-githubusercontent.webp[.]se/
hxxps://avatars-githubusercontent.webp[.]se/

We previously contacted you about this issue on 2025-02-10 17:56:15 (UTC).
Since our last notification, the following additional URL(s) have been detected:

hxxp://avatars-githubusercontent.webp[.]se/

You may not have been aware of this attack; however, you are still responsible for removing it.

This attack targets our customer, GitHub, website URL https://github.com/.

Please remove this fraudulent content, and any other associated fraudulent content, as soon as possible.

Additionally, please keep the fraudulent content safe so that our customer and law enforcement agencies can investigate this incident further once the site is offline.

More information about the detected issue is provided at https://incident.netcraft.com/f36131fb3b5b/

Kind regards,

Netcraft

Phone: +44(0)1225 447500
Fax: +44(0)1225 448600
Netcraft Issue Number: 66860795

At the same time, Cloudflare had taken down our domain, and browsers flagged our domain as a phishing site.

Upon checking the issue, we discovered that this problem stemmed from our front-end load balancing Workers (refer to: “Using Cloudflare Workers at the edge to enable services to source data from nearby locations – reducing global average latency.”) not correctly handling non-image requests. When users accessed the domain https://avatars-githubusercontent.webp.se/ directly, our backend returned a 500 error (indicating the corresponding origin did not return image format content). The Worker mistakenly thought the backend was down and fetched content from https://avatars.githubusercontent.com instead, inadvertently outputting GitHub’s webpage.

Such behavior indeed looks very much like phishing.

We responded to Netcraft but did not hear back, so we decided to abandon this subdomain and use https://avatars-githubusercontent-webp.webp.se/ as a replacement, notifying customers who relied heavily on this service.

We acknowledge this mistake and apologize to affected users.

WebP Cloud

Data

As of the writing of this article, we have over 1,600 users and more than 1,100 websites successfully onboarded, of which over 240 use custom domain names. We are particularly happy to report that the Adaptive Resize feature launched in May 2024 is being used by over 160 websites. This year, we will continue to explore new features and make them available to all users.

Compared to over 400 users at this time last year, our growth rate has increased this year, thanks to our still-nascent operation. This growth could not happen without the strong support and appreciation from users for our services, whether through writing articles introducing our services or referring us to friends.

Follow

Our biggest client success in 2024 has been Follow. Since September 2024, we have gradually engaged with the Follow team to explore the implementation of WebP Cloud within Follow, culminating in a formal collaboration in October 2024.

Currently, the following services for Follow are:

• GitHub Avatars
• Optimization and output of all images in article bodies
• Source service for all images in article bodies
• Favicon images for search pages

All of these services are provided by WebP Cloud for optimization and output, effectively covering the entire image business of Follow, saving significant maintenance and infrastructure costs compared to their previous self-built structure, and validating the stability and availability of WebP Cloud under high traffic conditions— a win-win for both!

Open Source Contributions

Like WebP Server Go and Public Service, we are using the Go wrapper of the libvips library, govips, and in 2024 we continued to submit PRs to govips:

• https://github.com/davidbyttow/govips/pull/452
• https://github.com/davidbyttow/govips/pull/417
• https://github.com/davidbyttow/govips/pull/416

As last year, we will continue to invest more of our revenue into donations for open-source projects as a token of gratitude to the authors of related projects. This year our donation projects include:

• https://github.com/gofiber, our widely used HTTP framework, donated $37 USD
• https://github.com/buckket/go-blurhash, for implementing the Blurhash part in Meta interfaces, donated $50 USD
• https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery, donated $55 USD (as we did not find a Sponsor entry, we made a BTC transfer: link)
• https://github.com/passwordless-id/webauthn, a front-end Passkey framework, donated $76.32 USD

Blog & Referral

This year, we also continued to output and document our thoughts and progress on products in our blog. Compared to last year, the article most favored by everyone remains our review of Hetzner ARM64, “The performance review of Hetzner’s CAX-line ARM64 servers and the practical experience of WebP Cloud Services on them.”, followed by “Using Cloudflare Workers at the edge to enable services to source data from nearby locations – reducing global average latency.”.

Furthermore, due to the significant impact of the most popular article, “The performance review of Hetzner’s CAX-line ARM64 servers and the practical experience of WebP Cloud Services on them,” we continue to acquire new users through our referral link for Hetzner, resulting in an additional €120 in referral income this year, which indirectly reduces our costs—an unexpected joy!

If you’re interested, here’s our Hetzner referral link.

Outlook

Finally, let’s discuss our outlook for this year.

This year, our focus for WebP Cloud will be on exploring and optimizing new features (for instance, we may launch a similar service to an image hosting platform).

Secondly, we will explore commercialization and sustainability. Although we are not seeking funding and do not face pressure to turn a profit (this means that all successes and failures must be attributed to our team’s efforts and not external factors), and despite maintaining profitability with our existing customers, we hope to see this snowball effect grow bigger. This not only validates the viability of our initial concept for WebP Cloud but also keeps our confidence high to continue providing a refined and user-friendly service in the industry, giving users an alternative beyond just a few major public clouds.

For WebP Server Go, we will significantly modify the overall code structure this year, further aligning it with the direction of being “easy to deploy and maintain while being feature-complete.”

For Public Services, maintaining a 100% SLA and gaining further customer recognition and engagement remains our consistent goal.

That’s all.