Cost of having Web Storage Space..

bgo1

Would anyone in the know have an idea of the cost of 'space' for a website that as part of its functionality had to hold 1000's of user uploaded pictures.

Does it cost exponentially more to host a couple of 100 user pictures to a couple of thousand to tens of thousands of pictures or is it negligible difference unless into hundred of 1000s etc?

I suppose to understand in simpler terms does the likes of Facebook face a bigger and bigger bill every year as more and more photos are added.

Thanks for info.

devildriver

bgo1 wrote: »

I suppose to understand in simpler terms does the likes of Facebook face a bigger and bigger bill every year as more and more photos are added.

Thanks for info.

Essentially yes. Simply put the more data that you need to store the more storage you will need. Each drive in a server has a finite amount of space. When you are talking about something like Facebook, Amazon or Google they have economies of scale that make their storage cheaper per gigabyte than almost any other company. However it still costs them a huge amount but their revenue models (well Google's anyway!!!) ensure that the storage is paid for by their businesses.

Also these huge companies can build their own custom storage solutions to their own specs for maximum efficiency.

Here's a detailed report of how a backup company created their own hardware and software technology:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

tricky D

There's not just storage which might need consideration, but also any transfer limits can apply to hosting packages.

Trojan

If you're using this question to make hosting decisions (and we cannot discuss hosting companies here) then be aware that anyone who claims "Unlimited" anything, either in terms of disk space or bandwidth, is not being entirely truthful. There are always limits, regardless of claims.

bgo1

Thanks for the replys guys.

Im asking this on Boards without having done research on it so far so apologies for that in advance but...are we talking 100's of euro a year (1000's?) for a site holding 1000's to 10000's of user pictures?

I know things are negiotable and different hosting companies = different prices etc but in general what type of money are we talking for hosting this amount of images..

Is cloud computing making these this much cheaper as time goes on?

Graham

Cloud computing often isn't all that cheap, especially when things start to scale up.

You can get an idea of storage pricing here:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

Don't forget to add data transfer in/out to the costs of the storage space itself.

Trojan

Let's take a hypothetical and build some numbers. Let's assume there's 500 users with 100 photos each, and the average user has an iPhone 4 with an average file size of 1.8MB. That's 50,000 average photos, or 87 GBs. Double it for backup, and add another 50% for thumbnails and smaller file sizes.

That's 263 odd Gigabytes, 50,000 uploads, at least 50,000 views (lets call it 100,000 views).

Amazon S3 storage is a very approximate $0.08 per GB or $21 per month for 263GB.

Amazon S3 does free uploads, and approx $0.1 per GB download, if we're downloading (viewing) 100k x 1.8MB that's 175GB or $17 for transfer costs.

So very approximately $40-50 per month for 500 users with 100 photos each to make 50,000 photos.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/08/flickr-reaches-6-billion-photos-uploaded.html

Flickr reached 6 billion photos in 2011, and Facebook dwarfs it by around a factor of 10 in terms of photo hosting (ever wonder about their image compression?)...

(Other 2011 numbers of photos I saw somewhere were Photobucket's 8 billion, Picasa's 7 billion, apologies lost source).

devildriver

Graham wrote: »

Cloud computing often isn't all that cheap, especially when things start to scale up.

You can get an idea of storage pricing here:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

Don't forget to add data transfer in/out to the costs of the storage space itself.

If you are using S3 you can reduce the I/O costs by using a CDN:

http://blog.netdna.com/maxcdn/how-to-speed-up-your-amazon-s3-bucket-with-a-cdn/

I use MaxCDN (NetDNA) for all my sites, it's the dog's danglies!

smcelhinney

Trojan wrote: »

Let's take a hypothetical and build some numbers. Let's assume there's 500 users with 100 photos each, and the average user has an iPhone 4 with an average file size of 1.8MB. That's 50,000 average photos, or 87 GBs. Double it for backup, and add another 50% for thumbnails and smaller file sizes.

Great post. Might just rob this to show to clients when they say to me "but it's just a few pictures I'm hosting.."