Images Attachments =Higher Monthly Bill

[Hollywoodhigh]

I have been asked 9,000 times over the year by same people WHY I don't allow image attachments.

I've learned that as these images are uploaded and saved to server, my bill climbs.

I like having a cheap bill for a free forum and want to know IF I allow image attachments for posters to upload to site will this increase bandwidth/space and my monthly bill?

THANK YOU

 

[Hollywoodhigh]

Here's latest request from a member..

I still don't understand the attachment thing but only because my forum has been doing it from the get-go and it's never been a money or server problem.

For such a pic heavy forum, it would really behoove you to have an upload option... but I've been telling you that for years now. If I didn't offer that, dunno where my forum would be today.

 

[Kevin]

The answer depends on your hosting service and your available resources. Are you on some type of hosting service that bills based on the amount of disk space used and as you use more space you get billed more each month? Even for most 'shared' hosting plans you get X amount of disk space included in your plan so if people upload attachments you're fine until you start reaching that X amount. If you're on a VPS plan most hosting services offer add-on charges for extra disk space. As you get into more complicated setups you could even offload the attachments into dedicated storage services.

So let's start there... what type of hosting plan are you using?

 

[Hollywoodhigh]

Thanks Kevin… Not sure.. paying as I go monthly. I took a screen shot if this helps...

(I see Upload images is OFF here @ Xen tooo, there's a reason)

 

[Kirby]

(I see Upload images is OFF here @ Xen tooo, there's a reason)

It is not.

 

[Jake B.]

Thanks Kevin… Not sure.. paying as I go monthly. I took a screen shot if this helps...

With Digital Ocean, Linode and other similar VPS solutions you're not going to get a whole lot of disk space. Digital Ocean does have "Spaces" which is an object-based storage, which is much more cost effective than normal SSD storage on the VPS itself. Chris made an add-on to support this (as well as Amazon's S3 service): https://xenforo.com/community/threa...-amazon-s3-for-file-storage-in-xf-2-x.156282/

And for what it's worth, you're only paying "as you go" until a certain cutoff point with Digital Ocean where it becomes a flat monthly fee and they stop charging the hourly rate. I think this is capped at around 700 hours or so: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

(I see Upload images is OFF here @ Xen tooo, there's a reason)

XenForo.com has image upload enabled

 

[Hollywoodhigh]

Thank you Jake … I am going to share this with my webmaster and figure it out.

Thank you both

 

[Mendalla]

We are a small board and our hosting package has a decent chunk of disk space and bandwidth relative to our size so I don't fret too much about this yet. I still encourage people to us a service like imgur and then hot link rather than upload, but it is not at the point of being a worry.

 

[Jake B.]

I still encourage people to us a service like imgur and then hot link rather than upload, but it is not at the point of being a worry.

I probably wouldn't encourage this too heavily if those images are important to your board after what happened with Photobucket last year

 

[Mendalla]

I probably wouldn't encourage this too heavily if those images are important to your board after what happened with Photobucket last year

We don't get a lot of images posted and a significant percentage of them are just memes and similar so not a big concern. We do have people posting pictures of arts and crafts, and I think they are either uploading or hot linking to their FB. The bottom line is still that I am really not fretting about it yet given current traffic and posting rates.