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You can go surprisingly far with a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet and the Cloudflare free tier. Just host your website the boring way, put CF in front of it and they will cache and serve all of your static content for free.
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If one is worried about scale, it's pretty easy to throw them behind a CDN like Cloudflare or Bunny.net. They'll cache the static file for you so that your web server isn't always delivering it. I used to upload assets for apps to S3 to be served from there when I just started thinking that my CDN is going to be taking the vast majority of hits for static files so why should I be adding a step to my deploy process?
99,99% of people are overestimating their blogging needs. Unless you're Scott Hanselman the cheapest Hetzner VPS will cover all their hosting needs. It's amazing that even many developers nowadays don't really understand how far just basic hosting will take you before you need edge, cdn, s3 or anything else.
Some meta-commentary about some of the replies ... so far, there are 4+ replies suggesting the obvious step of storing in the images on the same web server host. But I notice the submitter is software engineer ex-Stripe, ex-Yelp, ex-Adobe... so I'm guessing he already knows that simple setup but doesn't locally host gifs & vids for technical reasons (bandwidth?, latency?). Maybe recalibrate the suggestions based on t…
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This is what I’ve done - if you want to be a bit more protective you can do some things to make sure they’re not hotlinked from elsewhere, but that’s up to you.
Me too. I took it one step further: I don't have an image-heavy site, so I degrade the resolution to make images as small as possible, then embed them in the HTML as base64 strings. Very portable!
You can even base64 the thumbnails and still have "click through" to the source image if desired.
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> If one is worried about scale, it's pretty easy to throw them behind a CDN... But at that point, why don't you just put your entire site into a CDN? I would think a landing page / blog would be mostly static?
What problem would that solve? Using Cloudflare is very straightforward.
From the original question:
> I am curious what are the current best practices and offerings for hosting images (or short videos, gifs, etc.) for small to mid scale websites?
At that point your images are in the same place, and have the same workflows, as your entire site. If your blog / landing page is spread among different services, it'll take more time to maintain, more time to train a newcomer to understand, more points of failure...
IE, if you use one of the "git repo -> CDN" products, your images and static content are part of the same workflow, and the CDN handles all of your scalability issues. Your update process simply becomes a "one and done" pull request with 100% off-the-shelf automation.
> Using Cloudflare is very straightforward
Last weekend I hit a bug in Cloudcannon -> Cloudflare's certificate handling. Our landing page was down for about half a day. Fortunately it was Sunday night and most of our customers aren't the kind of people who'd be browsing our landing page on a Sunday. It was resolved quick enough, but it would have been a lot more frustrating if we were a consumer product or our blog was a lot more integral to our business.
I'm not entirely sure where to point the finger, though. We "bring our own cert" instead of using Cloudflare's (or Cloudcannon's) automatically-generated certificate.
Some meta-commentary about some of the replies ... so far, there are 4+ replies suggesting the obvious step of storing in the images on the same web server host. But I notice the submitter is software engineer ex-Stripe, ex-Yelp, ex-Adobe... so I'm guessing he already knows that simple setup but doesn't locally host gifs & vids for technical reasons (bandwidth?, latency?). Maybe recalibrate the suggestions based on t…
OP here. All answers are good. I was looking for a lay of the land and appreciate all the options people are chipping in with.
Why & how did you arrive at the decision to use Cloudinary to host images for your Savory website instead of locally hosting them yourself?
Have you looked at your Cloudinary analytics dashboard to quantify what magnitude of bandwidth you're dealing with?
Are you currently on Cloudinary's free tier plan or paid? Since you mentioned the Github image hack, are you looking for a zero cost hosting of images?
The more datapoints and constraints you provide as background, the better the advice in your replies will be.
CloudFlare Pages (https://pages.cloudflare.com/) has a free plan with 100 sites, unlimited requests, unlimited bandwidth. Maximum file size 25MB, 20,000 files, 100 domains, 100 custom headers, 2,000 static redirects, 100 dynamic redirects. (https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits/) Unknown if there's a commercial restriction.