I know this is self hosting, but I would probably just drop them in a S3 bucket with static hosting enabled and be done with it. Never have to worry about availability or big transfers eating up your upload at home. Probably wouldn’t cost more than a dollar a month.
OP, please do this. If you are dealing with other people's photos professionally, a home server is in no way adequate storage for that except as part of a proper backup policy (3, 2, 1 or something else with redundancy).
My concerns right now are this is the second time I've had space issues with my hosting service and when something goes wrong, it's easy to diagnose which service is causing it (wordpress or host). Do those concerns sound valid for what you're suggesting?
An S3 bucket won’t have a hard cap. You pay a small amount monthly based on how much storage you use. Here’s a good guide I found: https://pawlean.com/2020/07/15/how-i-use-aws-s3-to-host-images-on-my-blog/
Perfect! Thank you for the link.
Id second the s3 idea as youre hosting data for professional reasons. Backblaze and cloudflare also offer s3 compatible storage, when i priced them up for work cloudflare was by far the cheaper option. But iirc their s3 api is still under development and is not ( at the time i used it) feature complete. We had some trouble generating pre-signed urls. But if you just want some place to store data these are worth a look
It's probably easiest to look at one of the many plugins for WordPress that allow you to use AWS S3 for image storage (and make sure you're resizing images when serving them to users even if you want the high-res ones still available for download).
A bit more advanced would be adding cloudfront before your S3 bucket to save on bandwidth costs.
Be careful with AWS though, you'll need to keep an eye on costs, and you should really think about whether you want to keep uploading your images at full resolution instead of resizing them first so they're optimised for display on a website.
How can you have too many images? What kind of limits are they showing?
Make sure you're uploading optimized images optimized for web, and not full size JPEGs or something.
You might look into NASs or at least NAS software depending on how much storage we’re talking about. Or there are S3-compatible self-hosted solutions that you can search for and do some research.
I might recommend, however, considering a service such as Backblaze if your website’s uptime is critical as a halfway between self hosted and SaaS. I like to self host stuff, but there’s some things such as data backups or password management that is better left to the cloud where you can get SLAs and confidence in your uptime (because it always seems that something goes wrong with your hosting on a Friday night when you’re heading out of town).
Hey, just to make sure -- are you performing image optimizations on uploaded images? You're not uploading 4000x3000 raw JPEGs, are you?
If you are, you can reclaim a ton of storage. (Keep the RAWs off the Internet on a HDD somewhere.)
They are optimized. It's a 5gb plan I guess. It looks like my options, in the comments here, are pay a monthly fee elsewhere and be done with it instead of constantly hitting barriers with my current host's limits.
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