Need hosting advice for picture sharing website

i am building a picture hosting website and need help on what sort of hosting i would need. Users will be able to upload their photos to it so i will need lots of memory (over 50TB) and they will be viewed by other users so it will have to be fast so they aren't waiting for the picture to load.

i seen amazons s3 storage and I'm not sure if this would be suitable for this kind of website or if its more of a backup thing can someone let me know.

and any other advice would be appreciated

 

You do understand that with S3, you're going to be paying $4000/mo. just for the storage alone, right?

I guess that's an option if you really need that much disk space. Otherwise, you are going to need an entire array of servers to cover that kind of disk space.

 

yes i do understand, and are you saying s3 would work for this kind of website?

 

Well...yes and no. It might work for storing the actual content, but you will need to have another server(s) to host your website. I don't know how fast that storage is going to be.

Honestly, you're much better off doing this with a bank of dedicated servers.

 

I guess Fatcow unlimited package ( with Unlimited Bandwidth and Storage) will suit your picture site in the best way.

 

Do you really think Fatcow is going to allow 50TB of disk space to be used on an "unlimited" $49/year shared hosting plan?? ROFL!!!

Let's get serious. He's looking for serious advice here.

 

Ok thanks WSWD, i was thinking off (if this is possible) having the data on amazon s3 and hosting with dedicated servers, or will the dedicated servers be able to handle that much memory without using amazon s3, i don't know much about dedicated servers.

And thanks for helping me out.

 

You're welcome! Well, the only way to test S3 would be to run some small scale tests. That would be cheap enough. Personally, I just don't think it would be fast enough to actually work well.

It's definitely possible with dedicated servers, but you're talking about an entire bank of them. Even with 4TB drives, you're talking about at least 15 of them or so. That's also assuming no RAID, which just isn't going to be safe. With RAID5 or RAID10, you're talking about literally dozens of drives to make this happen. Certainly doable...it's just a matter of doing it. Dedicated servers can definitely handle that much space.

 

Ok thanks i understand it a lot more now.

 

Being as you are still building I would start with a dedicated server or two like WSWD stated. You can get a bank of powerful dedicated servers for the price of S3 but at the same time you will need to hire someone to manage the servers if you aren't capable of doing so yourself.

 

If you're earning from your website, it may be worth your while to pay those extra dollars. After all, as long as your site is "up", you stand the chance of getting additional sales which will more than make up for the additional cost of a few bucks. Remember: no site, no sale.

 

Hi

You can do that with Rackspace cloud, they even have experts that will set it all up for you

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/

They are a great company

- Joseph