Building a photography community site where can I store my photos online?
I'm going to set requirements for a photography community site. An important feature of the study would be to provide more photos / accounts than competing sites in my country on the Internet. What are the opportunities there?
Should I go for something like amazon S3, or is there anything that offers more image related features? What I'm most interested in is the low cost per GB (storage and transfer).
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I've worked on a social networking site that has hosted billions of images and we rated the S3. The takeaway was that it is too expensive for high traffic sites. The drive itself is pretty cheap, but the costs of accessing content on the S3 add up quickly. This makes S3 more suitable for applications like online backups. In my opinion, the cost is the main one.
On the other hand, this is only a problem when your site gets big. The biggest benefits of S3 are that you don't have to worry about scalability and that it's pretty easy to set up and then forget about it because it just works. Many midsize services use S3 with great success.
The solution we went through is an array of dedicated servers that host images and also run web servers (don't use Apache, use web servers optimized for static content like lighttpd or nginx) and in front of them use CDN (content delivery network like akamai or panther express). You tend to get high hit rates (depending on your site's access patterns), so end users will get most of the files directly from the CDN and won't put any load on your servers (except when the file is first accessed). this way, you can be fine with one server and a mirror for a while. As you scale, there are problems with the distribution of images throughout the farm,excess management, etc.
I guess the time to market also plays a role. In this regard, starting S3 and getting it started quickly can be a good strategy. You can move on to a more complex solution later. In this case, make sure the manual takes this into account. Non-technical people tend to believe that once the functionality works, you don't have to touch it again. And keep in mind that migrating large amounts of data takes time. When we changed our photo archive, copy jobs took several months to complete.
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How about Flickr / Picasa integration? Users use their own Flickr / Picasa account to store their photo and use the features on your site. In this case, you pay nothing for storing the photo: P
I myself would like to have one photo repository acc. instead of having an individual acc. for each site.
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