I have a Wordpress site and recently ran into the problem of having too many images for my hosting services. But my job involves photography, so I was wondering where a good starting point would be to set up a physical server in my home to host all my photos for my website on Wordpress. Is that possible? I don’t know where to begin with searching either.
I know this is self hosting, but I would probably just drop them in a S3 bucket with static hosting enabled and be done with it. Never have to worry about availability or big transfers eating up your upload at home. Probably wouldn’t cost more than a dollar a month.
OP, please do this. If you are dealing with other people’s photos professionally, a home server is in no way adequate storage for that except as part of a proper backup policy (3, 2, 1 or something else with redundancy).
Id second the s3 idea as youre hosting data for professional reasons. Backblaze and cloudflare also offer s3 compatible storage, when i priced them up for work cloudflare was by far the cheaper option. But iirc their s3 api is still under development and is not ( at the time i used it) feature complete. We had some trouble generating pre-signed urls. But if you just want some place to store data these are worth a look
How can you have too many images? What kind of limits are they showing?
Make sure you’re uploading optimized images optimized for web, and not full size JPEGs or something.
It’s probably easiest to look at one of the many plugins for WordPress that allow you to use AWS S3 for image storage (and make sure you’re resizing images when serving them to users even if you want the high-res ones still available for download).
A bit more advanced would be adding cloudfront before your S3 bucket to save on bandwidth costs.
Be careful with AWS though, you’ll need to keep an eye on costs, and you should really think about whether you want to keep uploading your images at full resolution instead of resizing them first so they’re optimised for display on a website.
