Third-Party Storage Solution for a Website Application?

Question

Hi Guys,

I'm building a website that stores a lot of community-generated multimedia.

I originally wanted to store the data in my own SAN, but for scalability purposes I'm looking for a solution to store all the images outside my network and request them by HTTP request connectors.

I also want a solution that will let me grow in space easily by clustering or by other way.

I guess that there is a term for what I'm looking for, but I'm really not sure what it is.

I'm not sure if this question belongs to SO or ServerFault. I'm asking from the perspective of a web developer, but maybe it qualifies best for a networking question. My apologies if I'm wrong.

Best to all and wish you a happy new year.

Answer 1

Well, there have been a lot of services offering just that, the most popular being Amazon's S3 ( used for example at 37Signal ). A lot of libraries exist for almost any language being used in webdev, so maybe thats something to get you started!

Answer 2

Here are a few services you could use:

• Amazon S3 / Amazon CloudFront
• Rackspace CloudFiles
• OpSource Cloud Files
• Box.net

The terms you are looking for is "cloud storage" and optionally "content delivery network" or CDN for short. For example on Amazon, S3 is the cloud storage and CloudFront the CDN.