Considering Amazon S3 to host all our images
We are considering Amazon S3 for hosting media files due to some preliminary performance and load time results. Still up in the air but we have been hitting latency issues over the last 3 days, specifically with images and access. In some cases you had to refresh the page for the images to process and appear on each page. Prior to then we tried using Cloudflare but that simply did not work. We upgraded the hardware (virtual footprint) but that made little difference.
So far we are still examining the metrics around S3 load times, availability and any gaps in with our current edge footprint compared to what we are projecting with S3. The scary part being the cascading effect it may have on any DNS routing tables, and the core application + database load and processing times. It’s still up in the air, pHlatbed always plays nice but we can’t speak for the other guys across the table.
Using a content delivery network or CDN is basically offloading images from your own webserver to a CDN. It can be worthwhile under the right circumstances. As with many sites, about 50% of our hits and 66% of our bandwidth come from image processing, and we don’t want to run into the risk of saturating our pipe. Ideally we want to reduce both bandwidth AND CPU load from the web server having to serve up static images in addition to the cost savings (it gets very expensive quickly)! The cost savings will basically gave us another year of growth before we have to do something else.
More to come.