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Thanks for satisfying my curiosity! Also, congrats on your success! > Yes, my user-facing servers are proxying the files to the users. I've never operated a service as large as yours, so take my question with a grain of salt: I'm wondering whether it would make sense to split off the actual file front-end servers from the user-facing servers (going for a redirect approach instead of proxying), since the requirements…
Proxying the files has a number of benefits. - The first is that I can have all my API endpoints under one domain. This simplifies downloading as you don't need to make a separate request to figure out where the file is stored. - The storage servers that Hetzner sells only have 1 Gbps bandwidth. That runs out very quickly when a file goes viral. The 10 Gbps caching servers do a lot of heavy lifting here, this makes s…
Check out https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs/ implementation of reed solomon. Small files can still be served from 1 server.
It's also efficient for small files, which a image store requires.