Over the years, I’ve seen and read lots of funny rumours online about what happened to FileCabi.net. Here’s the truth.
I was in my early 20s when I started FileCabi from my bedroom in May 2005.
Originally, it was a file-hosting service. The name was the idea: FileCabi.net. Take out the dot and you get “File Cabinet”: somewhere people could upload their files and share them.
Back then, a lot of us were still on dial-up, and even early broadband was slow. Watching a video online meant waiting for it, sometimes for longer than the clip itself lasted. Finding something worth watching took a bit more effort.
There were hardly any video sites back then, and most were owned by random kids in their basements, not corporations. If you wanted to share a funny clip, you emailed it to your mates and hoped their inbox could take it, or you uploaded it somewhere like FileCabi.
Then I noticed something happening with the uploads.
Some of the videos were getting 5,000 hits.
It was the videos, not the files, that were attracting an audience. People wanted to watch what other people were uploading, and those numbers were enough to make me rethink the whole site.
So I made a full pivot.
FileCabi became a place to discover entertaining videos. That was the beginning of the FileCabi people remember: the clips, the community and the constant search for something worth sending to your mates.
The Wayback Machine capture: https://web.archive.org/web/20060101020331/http://www.fil…
The idea fitted into one line:
Where you provide the entertainment.
And people did.
What started with uploaded videos attracting 5,000 hits grew into a site where a single video could reach 900,000 views in a day.
Around those videos, a whole community had formed. People uploaded things, rated them, argued about them and came back looking for more. There were regulars, fan pictures, fan mail and even hate mail. FileCabi had become part of people’s daily internet routine.
The file cabinet I had started in my bedroom had quickly become one of the largest entertainment sites of its time.
By 2007, it had even made the Pentagon’s block list. FileCabi appeared alongside YouTube and MySpace on a list of 12 sites blocked on US Department of Defense networks. The reason given was bandwidth: a Pentagon official called the blocked sites “true bandwidth hogs”. In other words, too many people were watching.
A website I had started at home was now something the Pentagon had to account for.
The US Army’s announcement, with FileCabi on the list: https://www.army.mil/article/3216/defense_department_bloc…
The “bandwidth hogs” quote: https://www.govexec.com/defense/2007/05/pentagon-official…
The deal that cost me FileCabi
Eventually, I reluctantly agreed to sell FileCabi to LiveUniverse, an online entertainment company. LiveUniverse was building a network of video and entertainment sites, and FileCabi was to become part of it.
This was supposed to be the payoff for building something people wanted. All those years of work had led to a deal with a much bigger company.
I handed over the site. I received an initial down payment, but the agreed follow-on monthly payments never arrived.
LiveUniverse went under, and I was left without FileCabi or the money I was owed.
The site suffered too. After LiveUniverse’s collapse, the video updates stopped. The forum carried on, kept alive by the community, but the front page was no longer being updated.
The place people had visited every day to find something new was left to stand still.
Two words in YouTube’s emails
Then, in 2010, long after the sale, I suddenly saw FileCabi all over the tech news.
Its name had surfaced in the court papers in Viacom’s copyright lawsuit against YouTube and Google. Among the documents was a private email exchange between YouTube’s founders, dated 29 July 2005.
YouTube was still in beta, months before its official launch that December. Its founders were discussing FileCabi’s traffic and the direction their own video site should take.
The subject line was FileCabi’s web address.
Steve Chen: “steal it!”
Chad Hurley: “hmm, steal the movies?”
Steve Chen: “haha ya.
or something.
just something to watch out for. check out their alexa ranking.”
Chen later said the remark was a joke, and that “haha ya” backs him up. But the discussion about FileCabi’s traffic was there in writing.
The emails, as reported at the time: https://techcrunch.com/?p=166394
I read those emails as evidence that our audience numbers were helping shape their thinking about what YouTube should become. They were looking at what we had built while deciding the direction of their own site.
By the time the world was reading those words, I had already lost FileCabi. Now its name was back in the headlines, tied to the early history of the platform that would come to dominate online video.
The domain I could never leave alone
The years passed. I kept watching the domain and, if I’m honest, obsessing over getting it back.
At least twice a year, I would check again. Twice I missed the chance to buy it back, and each time the name stayed in somebody else’s hands.
So I kept checking.
A week ago, on a whim, I checked it again.
FileCabi.net was for sale on GoDaddy.
$270.
After all those years of waiting, there it was, with a price and a checkout button.
I bought it immediately.
Around twenty years after letting it go, FileCabi.net is finally back in its original hands.
The internet has changed enormously since I first built it, and we certainly have the connection speeds now. But the appeal of finding a video that makes you laugh, surprises you or makes you send it straight to a friend is still there.
So I’m bringing it back.
And for anyone who misses the old days, I’ve built a little nostalgia into the new version. Click Go back to 2005 at the top of any page, or “2005 view” at the bottom, and the whole site switches back to the original 2005 look: the cartoon devil, the red links, the lot. Everything still works, so you can watch, vote and post in the old style. Click “Switch to 2026 view” to come back.
To everyone who remembers the original FileCabi: welcome back. And if you’re discovering it for the first time, you’re arriving at a good moment.
Is there still room for a site like FileCabi? Let’s find out.
— tech-guy