Sysadmin Best solution for hosting images and expand? Use Amazon S3 or custom build like Glusterfs ?

The disadvantage with BackBlaze B2 is, I can't find a solution to prevent hotlinking. Yes, we can use hotlink protection on the Cloudflare side. However, it's really easy to find out the actual B2 address of the file. Backblaze provide nothing like referer settings to stop hotlinking.

 

You might want to try IBM Cloud or Azure as they're similarly priced to Amazon S3 with configurable permissions and are partnered with Cloudflare. But that is just off the top of my head. I'll see if I can get some concrete numbers for you here in the near future.

 

I used Wasabi trial and I only had to change the target server from S3's to Wasabi's and worked like a charm.

The only problem with Wasabi is that the minimum payment is 5$/month (and they servers are USA only for now)

 

Cool, I guess I'll give it a try as well!

 

These are concrete solutions to the current problem. The short term.
What will you do in the longer term?

Your forum images grow almost 30% per year.

What I want to advise you is making a good plan.
Look at the longer term.

Carefully test more then one solution and implement a solution that can grow with your site, is stable within your environment ( apart from all the beautiful talk from suppliers) and perhaps even more important.

You forum should still be profitable, including all servers, services, new service to be added and other cost.

Is it about a money site (forum)?
If that does not apply. There are other solutions. For example to archive old images.

 

I add that is cheaper if you are spending more then 5$ every month (and I think many are) because they charge at least 5$/month

 

Wasabi only charge for storage space or also for bandwidth usage?

For example, if i use 1 TB of storage that will generate about 20 TB of bandwidth per month, i will still only pay the 6$/Month?

 

I don't think so.

 

But doesn't support Paypal right? Just like Backblaze.