Image Storage Alternative

[Lunar Ronin]

I am the technical admin for a growing web forum. It's seven and a half years old, and currently has approximately 80,000 images stored, and growing rapidly. Members like memes, what can I say? A few months ago, I forced a conversion of all PNG images to JPEG, which saved six GBs of space. Even with that, the images take up about sixteen GBs of storage. The images cache takes up another seven GBs of storage. Since upgrading to XenForo 2.3, ImageMagick seems to be creating an additional image cache of its own, taking up another thirteen GBs of storage. That's 36 GBs of storage for images.

We upgraded our hosting account, so now we have plenty of RAM and CPU, but we're still very quickly running out of storage.

I did some digging around, and the popular image hosting solutions seem to be Amazon S3, CloudFlare R2, and DigitalOcean Spaces. I boycott Amazon for personal reasons. I was banned from Cloudflare a couple of years ago completely out of the blue and was never given an explanation as to why. So I tried creating a DigitalOcean account today. I created the account, started putting in my payment information, when suddenly I was kicked out and told that DigitalOcean requires more information from me to activate my account. I submitted a ticket. The reply I got from DigitalOcean support was, "We're asking for these additional pieces of information because there were some inconsistencies surfaced about your signup details." They want a selfie of me with government ID, and to provide a social media profile for them to go over. X/Twitter and LinkedIn were mentioned.

The only social media I use is Bluesky. Even if I did have a Facebook, X/Twitter, or LinkedIn account (which I don't), I certainly wouldn't hand it over for people to go through my social media. That's Orwellian nonsense.

So what are my alternatives?

 

[Old Nick]

Unboycott Amazon.

 

[Suzanne O]

Fix up your attatchments size.

It's currently set at 1024

Change it to the highest possible one and add video with the same amount of KB's

Look at changing hosts if AWS is too restrictive.

 

[Chromaniac]

there are tons of other options out there for object storage. backblaze b2, wasabi and so many more. almost all large hosting companies offer their own compatible service (linode etc). just google around for s3 compatible object storage services. the thing is that for fresh accounts, most of them would ask for more than usual information. i have to do id verification almost everywhere these days probably coz of my location. if you have an existing account on a major hosting company, just check if they offer object storage. you can also look at block storage if your existing host offers it.

 

[Forsaken]

I am the technical admin for a growing web forum. It's seven and a half years old, and currently has approximately 80,000 images stored, and growing rapidly. Members like memes, what can I say? A few months ago, I forced a conversion of all PNG images to JPEG, which saved six GBs of space. Even with that, the images take up about sixteen GBs of storage. The images cache takes up another seven GBs of storage. Since upgrading to XenForo 2.3, ImageMagick seems to be creating an additional image cache of its own, taking up another thirteen GBs of storage. That's 36 GBs of storage for images.

We upgraded our hosting account, so now we have plenty of RAM and CPU, but we're still very quickly running out of storage.

I did some digging around, and the popular image hosting solutions seem to be Amazon S3, CloudFlare R2, and DigitalOcean Spaces. I boycott Amazon for personal reasons. I was banned from Cloudflare a couple of years ago completely out of the blue and was never given an explanation as to why. So I tried creating a DigitalOcean account today. I created the account, started putting in my payment information, when suddenly I was kicked out and told that DigitalOcean requires more information from me to activate my account. I submitted a ticket. The reply I got from DigitalOcean support was, "We're asking for these additional pieces of information because there were some inconsistencies surfaced about your signup details." They want a selfie of me with government ID, and to provide a social media profile for them to go over. X/Twitter and LinkedIn were mentioned.

The only social media I use is Bluesky. Even if I did have a Facebook, X/Twitter, or LinkedIn account (which I don't), I certainly wouldn't hand it over for people to go through my social media. That's Orwellian nonsense.

So what are my alternatives?

Did you use an anonymous email and a one-time credit card? A lot of businesses will immediately flag you as suspicious if that is the case.

As far as CloudFlare... I can only assume there's more to the story because CloudFlare is very lenient about who uses their service most of the time.

 

[Lunar Ronin]

Did you use an anonymous email and a one-time credit card? A lot of businesses will immediately flag you as suspicious if that is the case.

As far as CloudFlare... I can only assume there's more to the story because CloudFlare is very lenient about who uses their service most of the time.

No, e-mail with my own domain name, but not anonymous. Nope, used a credit card that I've owned for a few years.

Regarding CloudFlare, I kept hearing how great they are as a domain name registrar. So one day, I created an account, and registered a couple of domain names with them that I planned to use in the future, but not right away. I registered the domain names, paid for them, and logged off the account. A month later to the day, I received an e-mail message from CloudFlare that they refunded me the cost of the domain names and banned my account. I checked my credit card statement, and sure enough there was a refund. I was honestly stunned.

I sent an e-mail message to CloudFlare, simply asking as to why my account was banned and my domain name registrations refunded. Instead, they replied saying that they reviewed my account and the ban stood. They never provided an explanation. I've been warning everyone I know to stay away from CloudFlare since, if they're up for randomly banning people who simply made a purchase with no reason.

 

[eva2000]

Cloudflare and Digitalocean don't randomly ban customers, so something on your end is flagging their security/fraud etc protections I suspect. You really need to get to the root cause, otherwise you'll eventually run out of service providers to use.

I'd first check if your a victim of identity fraud and check your credit score etc.

Also possibility of your location in play too?

Oh wait you said you're technical admin for this forum? So you don't own it? Then owner of forum won't have any links to your identity so would be less of an issue anyway. Cloudflare R2 storage would probably be most cost effective due to free egress bandwidth

 

[Lunar Ronin]

Cloudflare and Digitalocean don't randomly ban customers, so something on your end is flagging their security/fraud etc protections I suspect. You really need to get to the root cause, otherwise you'll eventually run out of service providers to use.

I'd first check if your a victim of identity fraud and check your credit score etc.

Also possibility of your location in play too?

Oh wait you said you're technical admin for this forum? So you don't own it? Then owner of forum won't have any links to your identity so would be less of an issue anyway. Cloudflare R2 storage would probably be most cost effective due to free egress bandwidth

Thanks for the thought. I have one of the most common names in North America. I also live in a multi-generational household with another family member with the same name. It makes things fun at times. Our credit histories are a bit intermingled, along with my deceased grandfather's who also had the same name, and a couple of other people in the area who also have the same name. I spent about five years trying to get it straightened out with the various credit bureaus, only semi-successfully. I suspect that it's a combination of that, that I use an adblocker at the network level, and possibly my own domain name for my e-mail address. Otherwise, my credit score is exceptional.