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Hosting images off site on something like photobucket?

by erichammer
9 replies
I don't recall anyone in IM ever suggesting an idea like this so it may be completely wacky to think about, but would it work to host blog images off of my server on something like Photobucket or one of the thousands of other free image hosts? I assume the only downside could be that images may load a bit slower, though I'm wondering if I had something like cloudflare or MaxCDN whether or not those services would cache the offsite images and make them load faster.

Any thoughts as to why this might be a good or a bad idea?

Thanks in advance.

Eric
#hosting #images #photobucket #site
  • Profile picture of the author WriterWahm
    In my early days of blogging I did that a lot - hosted my images on photobucket and used them via the links on my blog. It was okay for a while but there were many times when the images would get deleted without any reason given. This was particularly for old posts; I'd get a new comment and go back to that post only to discover something weird where my picture was supposed to be. When this happened repeatedly, I just stopped using the service.
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  • Profile picture of the author erichammer
    Thanks. Just been doing some research and it seems SmugMug may be a good choice. They let you do unlimited photos, guarantee never to delete them and they even let you do videos up to 20 minutes. They do charge a fee, but it's not terribly expensive and if you end up with lots of photos (not to mention videos), it sounds like it may pay for itself. Need to do a bit more research before I commit to that though. I'm just trying to see how I can keep my server costs low while providing a good experience for customers...
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  • Profile picture of the author mgreener
    Hi,

    Not sure why you would want to do this in the first place. Sites come and go, so rather than building your assets on something that you don't control, you should probably host the images yourself. Learn how to compress filesize and you won't have any problems. Learn the difference between GIF and JPG and use accordingly (this reduces size and speeds up download time).

    Unless you have a LOT of huge images, you will be fine even with a small amount of storage space.
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  • Profile picture of the author chihuahua
    There are so many free hosting services around, you can just subscribe to such hosting and use some of the space for your image linking.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sojourn
    I've used PhotoBucket for more than 3 years to host photos I use in my Squidoo lenses. For the first 6-12 months, I was able to get away with the free account but I've since had to upgrade to the membership service based on bandwidth needs.

    I can think of only 3 times in those 3 years when PhotoBucket had a server issue or something and I experienced a temporary (very short - minutes) period of time where photos would not display. Other than that, load time is fast and reliable even for pages with 30+ images.

    Forgot to mention - other than for Squidoo, the only reason I'd host images on something other than my own site's server was if it would speed up my site load time. Otherwise, I'm not sure there's a tremendous benefit.
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  • Profile picture of the author erichammer
    Well I'm considering smugmug mostly because they also happen to offer hosting for videos for $60 per year. I do know however that if you resize the image first, it's not going to take up a great deal of space or bandwidth. I had been asking mostly because I was considering a WSO which had pretty limited bandwidth and storage. I spoke with the owner of the company though and made arrangements for a custom deal which I'm more comfortable with. That said, I'm still thinking smugmug may be a good choice simply because of the video hosting feature that they offer.

    Eric
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  • Profile picture of the author Koolsteve
    What happened to WriterWahm in her reply happened to me too. I keep all my pages, graphics, photos in my hosting space - nice and safe ;-)
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  • Profile picture of the author damoncloudflare
    Originally Posted by erichammer View Post

    I don't recall anyone in IM ever suggesting an idea like this so it may be completely wacky to think about, but would it work to host blog images off of my server on something like Photobucket or one of the thousands of other free image hosts? I assume the only downside could be that images may load a bit slower, though I'm wondering if I had something like cloudflare or MaxCDN whether or not those services would cache the offsite images and make them load faster.

    Any thoughts as to why this might be a good or a bad idea?

    Thanks in advance.

    Eric
    We really wouldn't help much if the resources are not directly on your site.
    Examples:

    I link a lot of my pictures to my blog from Flickr. These would not be cached.

    I upload pictures to my domain directly (like through a WordPress admin upload). These would be cached.
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    • Profile picture of the author erichammer
      Originally Posted by damoncloudflare View Post

      We really wouldn't help much if the resources are not directly on your site.
      Examples:

      I link a lot of my pictures to my blog from Flickr. These would not be cached.

      I upload pictures to my domain directly (like through a WordPress admin upload). These would be cached.
      Thanks. Got that answer already from the hosting company.


      For everyone else, I'm probably going to host the photos on the site itself since I arranged for a bigger bandwidth package as part of my deal (the initial package seemed to be rather skimpy to me as far as bandwidth, though I liked everything else which was why I wanted to use them. However, after speaking with the owner extensively, he put together a different package which I'm more comfortable with).

      That said, this whole business did bring up an interesting side option which was to host videos on smugmug instead of AWS. It seems that it could potentially be cheaper to do that if I get a significant amount of traffic, but I need to see how the load times are when I put videos there. I may also do a bit of testing with photos on smugmug only because photos and videos are included in the same price, but we'll see...
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