Rails gallery app hosting

Question

I'm building a rails gallery app for a company that doesn't want to host it themselves. They estimate that it could potentially get 1000 or so unique visits a day. What I'm pondering is... should the images be on a static file server such as S3 or rackspace cloudfile, or should they just be left on the same server as the app? There is plenty of room on the app server for them. But will the cacheing play a huge negative?

What are your thoughts?

Also, I haven't decided on a host... though I was leaning toward webbynode... but should i be looking at something else instead?

(They want the hosting to be less than $35/month.)

Thanks.

Answer 1

The main variable you need to consider is latency. Since your traffic is relatively low, you can self-host for $0 extra, or host on S3 and pay for bandwidth. The benefit of S3 is better latency for users across disparate locations.

If it were me, I'd self-host to keep the complexity of the app low. Then only move to S3 if you really need the optimization of the CDN.