Offsite Image Hosting - Maybe AWS

[hipsterdoofus]

This may or may not pertain to all of you but I thought it worth asking. I work at a public library and increasingly, we have images of historical events that we would like to make accessible to the public. Currently, the images are hosted internally and served out that way, but honestly, it seems like it would be smarter and more economical to put the hosting/ backup onto someone who specializes in that. It seems like going towards Amazon's AWS may be the way to go, but I have no idea where to start as far as considering the costs. Has anyone done this? Basically, I'm trying to plan something in our budget next year and would like to at least get a ballpark in place.

[ZeroHour]

How much data to be stored and how much transfer approx?

You could use s3 for things for example but its hard to estimate. We (EduGeek) use AWS extensively.

[hipsterdoofus]

How much data to be stored and how much transfer approx?

You could use s3 for things for example but its hard to estimate. We (EduGeek) use AWS extensively.

 

Unfortunately, I'm not real privy on what our transfers have been. I doubt they are exceptionally high. I would imagine I may be able to go look at logs to find out more (I didn't set up the current system). Right now I think that the amount of data stored is pretty low - maybe 200-250 GB, but we have a backlog of stuff that I would imagine would add at least another 200-300GB and then who knows from there. Obviously this type of thing is going more digital, and I'd like to see it be easily accessible online. My thoughts are if we hosted with Amazon, we wouldn't have to do the worrying about space concerns, backups, etc, but I'm not sure what the costs would be. I would also wonder exactly how we would handle metadata on images and such.

[ZeroHour]

This is probably your best start: Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator

It should help you see how the numbers scale for S3 hosting, if you have a lot of international traffic you can also put it through cloudfront.

S3 can host the files directly and share them via http/https url rather then traffic through your onsite.

[jmak]

My thoughts are if we hosted with Amazon, we wouldn't have to do the worrying about space concerns, backups, etc, but I'm not sure what the costs would be. I would also wonder exactly how we would handle metadata on images and such.

 

My thoughts generally align with this, but you will need to check any legal obligations you have and carry out the due diligence. I would expect it to be lower risk and cheaper than on site hosting, but as a public library you might have obligations to meet particular standards to ensure you can guarantee that data isn't lost.