RetroGaming

AI datacenters buying up the hardware is why their hosting costs increased. Worsening the problem significantly.

Selfish chuds were routinely bypassing download limits

Huh?

Too late now. There is a subreddits trying to archive it all though. Owner of Internet Archive doesn't seem thrilled about it though.

From the announcement on the Discord:

Information about the closure of Myrient

Hello everyone,

I have decided to shut down Myrient on 31 March 2026. Until then, the site will continue to remain available in its current state. Please download any content you find important, as you have around one month to do so.

There are several reasons for the closure:

• Insufficient funding As traffic continued to increase last year, the amount of funding from donations remained the same. I have been paying more than $6000 out of pocket every month in order to cover the difference which is not sustainable.

• Paywalled download managers In the past several months, many specialized download managers were created that completely bypassed the site, donation messages, and download protections. Some of these download managers locked certain features behind a paywall that required users to pay in order to gain access. The use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes has always been strictly forbidden. Such egregious and abusive usage of the site cannot be tolerated anymore.

• Rising RAM, SSD, and HDD prices Since last September, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have surged dramatically and continue to rise due to the ongoing extreme demand for AI datacenters. This has caused Myrient's hosting expenses to go up as well. Necessary upgrades to the storage and caching infrastructure only exacerbated the problem. With a large number of servers and the aforementioned existing monthly deficit in excess of $6000 out of pocket, there is no way to pay for the increased hosting and hardware upgrade costs.

There are still many other smaller reasons, I could go on and on about them, but nobody would want to read it.

In short, I can no longer afford to run the site.

If you have any comments, you can send them to support@erista.me (I will read all of them and might respond to a few).

Thanks for using Myrient over the years.

From the article:

Aside from that, RAM, SSD, and HDD prices have been steadily rising due to the AI infrastructure build-out, resulting in higher hosting expenses for Myrient as well. We’ve actually seen this with German data center giant Hetzner, which is hiking prices up to 37% starting April 1. The archiving site said it needed “necessary upgrades to the storage and caching infrastructure,” which it cannot afford due to memory chip and storage shortages.

The creator also complained about abusive users who were monetizing Myrient content. Not only did they bypass the donation messages and the site's built-in download protections, but they also added a paywall that defeated the site’s policy against paywalls.

Vimm's Lair is still around, you just need to run a browser script that puts the download buttons back

I've often had a lot of luck with finding things like this on archive.org

Look at their FAQ. If you're on Linux wget on the folder works a treat.

Bittorrent

But still not enough to install every single expansion for Sims 4.

They have every available variant of every game, so there are anywhere between 2-10 copies of the same game for each console it was released on.

Shit, you could probably fit everything before the DVD era on a single drive.

My PS2 archive is around 2,9TB compressed, so "modern" is relative. PS3/XboxOne is a multitude of that.

Everything was direct download on Myrient. It was also pretty fast for a free site.

It would be a huge LOL if The Internet returns to its roots.

I haven't touched Usenet in years but it's largely unchanged. For people not in the know you think you've seen crazy on modern social media? Wait until you see the crazies on Usenet. It's glorious they're productive!