galvin Posted September 19, 2011 Share Posted September 19, 2011 I am building a website that will essentially have information in table-like grids. Many of the tables will have images for each piece of info. The images will only be like 100x100 at most, but each table (i.e. each page of the site) may have between 0 and 100 images. And by its nature, there is no limit on how many tables/pages there will be total. It will constantly be growing, well into the thousands, because a lot of the info will be user-generated/uploaded. So, all along, I was assuming I'd use a site like imageshack and either implement their API on my site, or have detailed instructions explaining the very simple steps to upload an image to imageshack and get the "direct link. FYI, I would pay the $5 a month premium price at ImageShack which they confirmed allows me to hot link as many images as I want. This would obviously keep all the image bandwidth off of my server. But lately some people have warned me that it's risky to have all your images under someone else's control, especially "shady" image hosting sites. So based on that, I looked into the possibility of allowing users to upload images directly onto on my own "shared hosting" server with HostGator (under a different sub-domain to help with parallel downloading). This would give me full control of the images and be the easiest option for users, but my plan is for the site to have thousands and thousands of images within a few years, so I feel like it will just crash my shared hosting server eventually and I'd have to go bigger. So that made me consider going right to a VPS server. I just feel like that will be unnecessary for at least a few years, so maybe I should start on shared hosting and then move once I run into bandwidth problems (not sure that's they right way to think though). And of course, I'm also beginning to research a THIRD option of using CDNs (like Amazon's S3 and Cloudfront). Never having done a site with tons of images before, it's hard for me to know if that type of service is even necessary or not. Anyway, I'm just looking for anyone's general feedback or experiences they've shared/knowledge gained on this confusing subject of where to host images when your site will have A LOT of them. I need to make a decision soon since most of my site is done EXCEPT for the whole aspect of how I'm going to let people get their images onto the site. I'm terrified to make the wrong decision up-front that may cause me massive headaches down the road. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 19, 2011 Share Posted September 19, 2011 Go for the CDN. - I don't know about the "shady image hosting sites" deal, but regardless of privacy policies and such I'd prefer a more restricted place. - Shared hosting is better but can be more expensive as you'd be buying more than just storage space. - CDNs are regional, cheap, and prolific. They're specially geared towards delivering files to people. Costs aside, between the CDNs I've tried (Amazon S3 and Rackspace CloudFiles) I like Amazon's implementation more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
galvin Posted September 21, 2011 Author Share Posted September 21, 2011 Thanks for the reply requinix! I'll read about Amazon's service more on their site, but just curious, I assume I would be able to have an upload image area on my site where users could upload images directly to my Amazon S3 account. I could fully customize that area to match my website design right? (colors, font, etc). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 21, 2011 Share Posted September 21, 2011 Yeah. They would upload the image from a form on your site to your server which would then upload it to the CDN (and delete the local copy). The CDN simply provides storage - everything else is your website and your webpages. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
galvin Posted September 21, 2011 Author Share Posted September 21, 2011 Ahhhh, ok, so the process of uploading the images will still put some stress on my server. I was thinking the images could somehow be uploaded directly to Amazon, but apparently not. Anyway, I'm sure the hosting of all the images on a separate server will still prove to be worth it in the end. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
requinix Posted September 21, 2011 Share Posted September 21, 2011 I was thinking the images could somehow be uploaded directly to Amazon, but apparently not. I vaguely recall there being a way to do it, but unless these images are large (tens of megabytes) then I wouldn't bother. It's not much added stress, really. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rinasparks Posted September 23, 2011 Share Posted September 23, 2011 If I'm not mistaken, I had read that amazon s3 has a tool called Cross FTP, it's an FTP Client also so you can upload/download files from amazon s3 storage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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