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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jul 2010
    Posts
    57

    Web hosting architecture - Photo uploading / retrieving

    Dear All,

    I need help on planning my architecture for dating site. We are having customer who will upload their photos.
    This is always going to grow. Various size of photos will added every day by registered customers.

    My website is currently on Rackspace SSD VPS server using Cpanel. Since SSD space is very limited & Expensive,
    I cannot used it for storing the user photos / images.


    Requirement : Photos can be uploaded,Retrieved, viewed very fast like facebook. & should be scalable.

    1. Option 1. - I create seperate server of ngnix [ static content ] & create the trusted network so that from main site [ VPS],
    Customer photos can be stored in particular directory on seperate server... viewed with URL path

    2. Option 2. - To the same VPS SSD server, attach additional Volume & create the Partition where User photos can be uploaded, retrieved
    & viewed with URL path


    Any advice on faster uploading, retrieving & viewing will be great help. I know we have CDN as solution however it is bit expensive
    for so much space of photos...

    Rgds,

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jul 2014
    Posts
    74
    Option 1, if you can find a server that gives you a dedicated RAID-1 SATA drives you can have plenty of space and it's likely to be fast enough for your site unless it's humongous. You can also look for SATA VPS but they may be slow if you share the disk with someone doing heavy IO. You can manually scale by adding more drives, and distributing you content over them, since disk IO is the bottleneck.

    What file size of image and bandwidth are you looking at anyway? There's a huge difference in required architecture between filling a 10Mbit pipe or filling 100Mbit, or if you need more than that.

    Option 2 is probably expensive since those hosting company's "cloud storage" solutions are pretty high-priced since they're designed to be fairly speedy.

    You can also look into AWS which is $0.03/GB/month or $0.024/GB/month for reduced availability. The higher cost may be in bandwidth.

  3. #3
    Option 1 gives you more flexibility.

    But I would go with some type of CDN even if it costs slightly more.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    Harrisburg, PA
    Posts
    2,074
    Quote Originally Posted by hzzg6y View Post
    1. Option 1. - I create seperate server of ngnix [ static content ] & create the trusted network so that from main site [ VPS],
    Customer photos can be stored in particular directory on seperate server... viewed with URL path

    2. Option 2. - To the same VPS SSD server, attach additional Volume & create the Partition where User photos can be uploaded, retrieved
    & viewed with URL path
    Either one of these options are going to introduce a significant amount of network lag. Even if you're on a private gigabit LAN, you're going to take a hit loading each and every user image over the network like that.

    If you're developing the CMS yourself, have you considered setting up a separate image server on a VPS or dedicated server somewhere, then having all the image references point to that server (ie, "http://img.example.com/hfu889fjdsa.jpg")? That way, you're offloading all the image HTTP requests to another server, and you don't get the lag introduced by having your main server serve them up after a second local network hop.
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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    Langley, BC
    Posts
    2,045
    Quote Originally Posted by hzzg6y View Post
    Any advice on faster uploading, retrieving & viewing will be great help. I know we have CDN as solution however it is bit expensive
    for so much space of photos...
    How busy is your site? Using S3 with S3QL file system cost you 3 cents per GB. But I would recommend moving your server to AWS as well, using their SSD powered EC2.

    With that you have an "unlimited" disk storage over S3, it is dynamic disk and grow by itself. You'll never run out of space.

    Then the lag will be minimal. If you use Reserved Instance on 3 year contract heavy usage, the price of the EC2 instance can drop very significantly as well.
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