Need more capacity at photos

boonex ----> Modules -----> Photos

Hi i am trying to research on a capacity problem i have. the photos uploaded by my users is filling way to much on my server. so i have looked a bit on amazon storage service. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

Is it possible to have the Modules/Boonex/Photos/data/files folder can be placed on another server with way more capacity like amazon service.

And if it is possible, how to acomplish it?

Hope someone can help

is this a way to do it ?

http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/wiki/TutorialHowToReplicateDolphin

Have you looked at just increasing the size of the server's hard drives?

LOL .... just upgrade your server (or HDDs / SSDs if your host will do this). We all have to upgrade servers as we out grown them =)

I agree. Just update the server. Hard drives are now available as large as 6TB. Well actually there is a 12TB drive available now. But the price is outrageous.

Anyhow. even with 4TB drives, multiples can be configured in a raid 0 configuration that can result in huge amounts of storage.

For things such as photos you don't want to store externally. It will be to slow. External storage should only be used for very infrequently accessed data.

So upgrade the hard drives. Local storage is way faster.

Out of curiosity, how much space are the photos currently eating up?

One thing that can also be considered is a process to compress the images upon upload. Unless you're storing photos for photography nuts, compressing the images will make it possible to store a lot more images.

Just a thought, you may have thought of it already ......

This is interesting.  Can this be done through the GD library?  What changes to the uploader would need to be done and what changes to the code used to load and display the images?

That's been one of my issues for a while. I have not been able to make this idea work nor does anyone have a mod here that allows you to resample the original image, always opting to store it away somewhere. It is a big flaw in the photo delivery system in Dolphin.

OK, I got a bit confused on this one.  Dolphin stores the images as jpeg; and one can set the level of compression of the jpegs when they are stored; it also stores the original image.  I was thinking about a compression/decompression where the quality of the image would not be touched.

One thing the OP of this thread can do is to remove the original image from the server; there is a forum topic on here about not storing the original image of photo uploads.

I suggested that Boonex implement client side image resizing about two years ago. Nothing ever became of it.  Not only would it drastically cut down on upload times, used server space would be reduced as well. Most digital cameras these days produce fairly large file sizes. and an option to resize images client side, would be a big help, and it's not that difficult.

I am using digital ocean and have the largest plan with 640 gb. I have used 470 of it. So its getting a bit close. The performence is good. but if anyone know a better place were i can get larger plans is good. i have tried a few of the one boonex advice to. But they are not very good in performing with thier unlimited plans. Digital ocean have also adviced to use cluster servers, but i have no idea on how this will be effected.

i guess i have Two ways, 

1. Find a larger plan

2. Have a cluster server with the same host.

any advice on this ?

Before we can offer advice to other solutions than Digital Ocean; we need to know your budget; no use telling you to go here or there if you can not afford here or there.

Based on what he is paying for his cloud hosting, he can afford the biggest dedicated at zarconia.net

I have never seen such a hosting plan as yours. Loads of memory and cores, but that solid state HD is what is holding you back. Your paying for excessive cores and memory that you don't need.

Best i can suggest is a dedicated Accel Server AS3 at zarconia.net.

I have seen lots of server adverts on the net with solid state drives.  Yes, a solid state drive is going to be faster at reading but there are many more things going on than just reading files from the hard drive that will influence the speed of the server.  The final leg of the journey is going to be the connection between the server and the end client; and that is not going to change no matter how fast you read the data from the drive to memory and send it out onto the net.

If you can migrate from that solid state drive to a nice big 1 or 2 terabyte drive, then do so.

 Actually, quite a few of them :)

I have never seen setups like that for hosting either, where you have mega cores and memory, but small capacity drives. Thank you for the recommendation Deano (as always).

I would think twice about using Zarconia. Sometimes it can take them a whopping 5 minutes to reply to a support request....

I am going to have to look into this... It's completely unacceptable! :)