Onista

Paying for the hosting services including the bandwidth expenses is a serious issue for all startups, especially the ones like ours where it is purely self funded.

And if the site allows users to upload media (pictures etc) under their profiles and share these across the site, the bandwidth usage and cost becomes a very serious issue. Also the issue of storage starts to creep in.

There are multiple solutions to this issue and each solution solves some issue but doesn’t go the whole nine yards where it is cheaper to store, cheaper to use and easy to deploy and change (from the maintenance point of view).

There are sites that just store the images locally on the file system and store a pointer to that in the database. Then there are some who store this whole binary extract in the database. In both the cases you still have to absorb the storage costs and the bandwidth costs but at least you have the complete control over the content and it is the easiest to deploy and maintain.

Then there is this thinking that you could actually outsource this whole media storing and retrieving issue to a third party solutions provider like Amazon S3 or a Nirvanix. This way you at least save your storage costs but are still stuck with the bandwidth costs.

This makes me wonder what the sites like ofoto, snapfish and flickr etc are doing to make sure that the costs of doing their business is the lowest possible and at the same time keep it working smoothly and more importantly at impressive speeds.