

Ask HN: Image hosting for user uploads - vikramhaer

This may be a fairly elementary question, but I was wondering what the best/cheapest way to do storage for user uploaded images is without relying on another platform like flickr or facebook. I'm assuming its S3 but would love to hear if there are other solutions out there.
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dclaysmith
I use Rackspace's cloud files:
<http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/>

Similar product to S3.

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vikramhaer
Do you have experience with S3 as well? Any advice on why you might choose one
over the other?

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dclaysmith
I moved over from S3 primarily b/c I was movingn from EC3 to Rackspace Cloud
Servers. The biggest headache I have now is you can't serve files over SSL on
Rackspace Cloud and they don't support CNAME aliasing. But I hear those are
both coming.

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andrewjshults
S3 + CloudFront (CDN). S3 is super easy to deal with programmatically and if
you ever need to do batch operations from a GUI, there are "FTP" clients that
can connect to S3. CloudFront is a nice bump up in performance for minimal
increase in cost (if you're trying to do as low cost as possible reduced
redundancy S3 is the cheapest option I've seen).

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mbenjaminsmith
App Engine's blobstore. I'm not sure about cost vis a vis S3, but I'm sure
that info is around. It's very easy to use. I recently set up AE for file
sharing (upload from app, user gets link to share) and it took me about 30
minutes of coding time.

