I'm working on a photography portfolio for a friend, and so far I've planned everything except how to store and serve the images. There are about 50GB of high-resolution photos, and I want to display low-resolution thumbnails and only fetch the high-res images when needed. Do I need a CDN for this? I've been searching but haven't found any free options. Are there better solutions for storing the images without breaking the bank? The site won't have much traffic, probably less than 50 visits a month.
3 Answers
If you want a straightforward and cost-effective solution, try storing the images in S3 or Backblaze B2, using low-res thumbnails on the website and only loading the full-res images when clicked. With your expected traffic, you probably won’t need a sophisticated CDN for this.
Finding free storage for that amount of data can be tough. I've had decent luck with Cloudflare; they offer a generous 10GB of free usage per month, and it’s $0.015 per GB after that. Just to clarify, that 10GB is about data transfer, not storage. But honestly, if you’re fine with that pricing, it’s a solid choice!
You might consider services like AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage; while they aren't free, they tend to be pretty cheap—sometimes under $5 a month. Just a heads up, they do require some setup, but in terms of reliability, it could save you a lot in the long run.
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