Do you host peoples pictures or require them remote host?

I always host attachments in the forum. In the past I used to have them stored in the database (vBulletin) but moved them in the files system for speed and to reduce the database size (the attachments are around 50K and occupy 4GB). This is a forum with 130K members and 8M posts.

I do however have another forum (FusionBB) that has 100 members or so and they have close to 10GB of attachments (they are nuts about pictures).

It is all a matter of how much bandwidth you are going to end up using. Also you will need to consider of people lifting images from your server (also called hotlinking) as well as the slowness that images bring to your site (since it is extra bandwidth).

At the moment I do not have any issues with the attachments. However down the line I will be looking at a CDN to deliver images faster to the users and save a bit on bandwidth.

I hope this helps.
 
It looks like the pictures I have but up myself is at about 4 gigs. I long ago had to switch over to a paid photo bucket account.

Educate me on a CDN?
 
I stopped and made people upload :p or hot link!

Just didn't have the space and bandwidth to kill at the moment.

As for images I wish we could hot link avatars too :p

Right now I got it so that avatars save as a file and not within the database.
 
jonsidneyb said:
It looks like the pictures I have but up myself is at about 4 gigs. I long ago had to switch over to a paid photo bucket account.

Educate me on a CDN?
Click to expand...

CDN = Content Delivery Network.

There are companies that offer such functionality (I personally use MaxCDN but there are others like Akamai, Amazon, SimpleCDN etc.).

I created a pull zone in the dashboard of MaxCDN. Then I created a CNAME record in my DNS pointing to their server i.e.

st1m.niden.net -> st1m.niden-fff.maxcdn.com (I made these up but you get the idea).

Now I replace every link to a JS, CSS or image resource from www.niden.net/,..... to st1m.niden.net/..... So for the logo for instance I have instead of

http://www.niden.net/images/logo.gif

I have

http://st1m.niden.net/images/logo.gif

The first time that the image is requested, the st1m will pull the image from the live site (www one). After that it will cache it (to a predefined time) and propagate it to its network. Any subsequent requests for that resource will be served from a node that is closer to the requester. So although my server is located in Arizona, any user that visits from Europe will have resources served from the European nodes of MaxCDN and the content from Arizona (of course).

Unless you want to hack away the whole forum to replace all the links to CSS, JS and image resources, for vBulletin in particular you can create replacement variables that will be like: url(./images/ -> url(http://st1m.niden.net/images/

In general a CDN will be able to save you a lot of money in bandwidth and speed up your forum for your users since the content will be delivered from your server while the resources from a location near them.
 
To be honest I tend not to post at sites that require linking of images via url, seems a lot of work if you just want to whack up a photo of a llama or something in reply to another member.
 
Ok, I will host pictures after the move. I just want to do it carefully. I started looking around and it looks like maybe 20-25% of the posts have pictures in them.
 
jonsidneyb said:
Ok, I will host pictures after the move. I just want to do it carefully. I started looking around and it looks like maybe 20-25% of the posts have pictures in them.
Click to expand...

If you are using vbulletin, in the admin control panel you can see how much space your attachments are taking.
 
One more thing regarding attachments...

As strange as it sounds, sometimes people want to remain as anonymous as possible. Part of that includes sharing their hosting account information on picture sharing sites. I like to have people set up to attach pictures if for no other reason than that.

For instance if the forum is about products that people can buy, someone inside a company that makes those things could join and share some pictures that could be incredibly interesting which the general public does not have access to. But if they need to put them on their photobucket account which has been used for other things they may be far more reluctant to share them.
 
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