Offsite photo hosting suggestions

[Engraver]

On a high traffic site does it make sense to use an offsite photo hosting service? Photobucket used to be good but they stopped allowing hot linking pics which created lots of broken images on various forum.
Comments and suggestions appreciated! Thanks!

 

[MySiteGuy]

Except for outlier cases, I've not seen the need for it, no matter the traffic of the site.

I've worked with sites that have done things like offload to Amazon S3, but my experience is a CDN effectively offloads from your server. They have a high enough image hit rates to cut down 90-95% of image fetches. It's more cost effective using a CDN like Bunny CDN or Cloudflare (which is often free).

 

[PatriotGB]

As a forum user... I haaaaaaaaaate it when I'm forced to post links to photos hosted (by necessity in such cases) offsite. I much prefer to be able to directly upload images to the forum site.

Accordingly, I made it so my forum could host photos directly. Users / members prefer it.

 

[Forsaken]

Except for outlier cases, I've not seen the need for it, no matter the traffic of the site.

I've worked with sites that have done things like offload to Amazon S3, but my experience is a CDN effectively offloads from your server. They have a high enough image hit rates to cut down 90-95% of image fetches. It's more cost effective using a CDN like Bunny CDN or Cloudflare (which is often free).

I'm using DigitalOcean for S3 and a CDN, and that has been working well; it has also become less expensive than BunnyCDN to the extent that we are looking at moving large files away as well.

 

[Sim]

It's unnecessary.

ZooChat has over 520,000 photos and I simply use Linode block storage to add the 240GB of additional storage I need - costs me US$24 per month and I can increase the storage space easily at any time. I simply mount the volume to the /internal_data/attachments/ directory and everything works seamlessly - XenForo doesn't even know there's anything different.

I could also use Linode's S3 compatible object storage which would cost around US$5 per month for the same storage requirement - but that adds a level of complexity to the system that I couldn't be bothered with.

 

[Engraver]

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. Very much appreciated.