Free images hosting with CDN - image

I am looking for free solution to image hosting with CDN. I got website on small paid hosting and there will be lot of image galleries which I would like to upload to some cloud like Google Drive and use cloud's CDN to link images on my web. Any recommendations for free solution ?

CDN and cloud storage like Google Drive are two different things.
A CDN can be defined as:
A content delivery network or content distribution network is a
geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data
centers. The goal is to provide high availability and high performance
by distributing the service spatially relative to end-users.
Where as cloud storage services provides highly available and secure storage space over the cloud. Here is a link which explains the difference of these two in terms of AWS(CloudFront vs S3).
If your website traffic is moderate and you want to use free CDN, then you may signup for AWS free tier. The free tier gives you 50 GB Data Transfer Out and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS Requests for Amazon CloudFront(AWS CDN) each month for one year. Here's a tutorial for getting started with AWS CloudFront
If you intended to use cloud storage services then also the free AWS tier provides you with 5 GB of space in AWS S3 for 1 year.
Apart from AWS free tier you may also like to checkout free Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. Levering these free tier resources it's even possible to host your current website on these platforms almost for free given the usage is within free tier limits.

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Google Cloud Storage to serve website images

We will launching a Google Campaign for our Website and expecting high number of users visiting our website.
Hence, I did some pre-calculations and figured out that serving images from Cloud servers would be best approach, which are currently being served from dedicated server.
I haven't got any clue on how Google Cloud Storage works or any other service. So can someone please guide me to relevant steps that I should be taking for hosting all our images to Google Cloud Storage and how can I serve them from Europe, and mapping of subdomain.
Currently I am following this Guide
Edit:
Before going for Cloud I compared the purpose of CDN vs Cloud and this what I figured out.
CDN: Used for serving contents from multiple regions: Speed is the purpose
Cloud: Used for serving contents for high bandwidth usage: High Availability is the purpose
And my Main purpose is High Availability, I hope I have gained correct information from dear friend Google.
Are you looking for this: https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/bucketnaming
You need verifying your domain name so it can use a CNAME in Google Cloud Storage
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gs-discussion/V-nLULNRQLI
After second thought, are you sure you need Google Cloud Storage?
It sounds like you just need a CDN or Amazon S3 stuff.
If memory serves, you need to do the following to use Google Cloud Storage with a custom domain:
verify your own domain names, such as example.com
upload images to Google Cloud Storage, you can use tools such as gsutil etc
serve these images with your own subdomain names such as images.example.com etc
You can serve images from google cloud storage. The nice benefit is: Google will do the serving for you and when you use the images api to create serving_url's you can crop and size the images while serving.
Look at this gist for details.
If you like to use you own domain as part of the image url, you cannot use https!
Serving Static Files
Applications often need to serve static files such as JavaScript, images, and CSS in addition to handling dynamic requests. Apps in the flexible environment can serve static files from a Google Cloud option like Cloud Storage.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/nodejs/serving-static-files

Linode VPS Capabilities

I have no experience with VPS's. Over the past year or two I've been getting more and more into web development, as a hobby and for work. I'm currently managing one wordpress site, a codeigniter app, a node.js/mongodb app, and various other personal projects. They are currently all hosted seperately (misc LAMP hosting, heroku, etc.).
I'm looking for a solution that will enable me to do the following:
Host Static/PHP Sites/Apps (so a LAMP stack)
Node.js/MongoDB/Redis
capable of other stacks (django/yesod/RoR/etc.)
Would a Linode VPS be capable of handling all of this? None of these sites get large amounts of traffic. The web apps are private, business management apps, used by 2-10 people at a time. The public sites are small business websites and my portfolio. I would like to be able to host future work on the same VPS as well (same types of small sites/apps).
I have no experience managing multiple domains on the same server. Is this easily done (or possible) with a single Linode VPS?
EDIT
I'm looking at the Linode 512MB/1GB VPS's, $20/$40 respectively.
Of course.
Especially after the massive Linode NextGen upgrades, a Linode VPS can easily handle this kind of workload. Since it's a VPS and not merely shared hosting, you get root access and therefore full control over the system.
In addition, Linode includes features such as advanced disk image management that allows you to clone and resize disk images as required and quickly boot into different images, as well as an out-of-band shell that allows direct access to the server's console in the event you cannot access it via SSH. A Linode 1024 (1GB) plan is more than enough for this sort of workload.
There are lots of different VPS providers out there. Rackspace is very expensive but probably has the highest level of reliability (100% uptime SLA with 5% refund per 30 minutes downtime) and outstanding "Fanatical Support". For less critical needs, there are loads of smaller VPS providers that offer cheap rates, but often with only minimal resources and fewer features. Some provide super-fast SSD storage for disk-intensive applications. You should shop around and do your research so that you find a VPS provider that meets your requirements.
I suggest that you may look into a shared hoisting plan on a reputed hosting companies like hostgator since there isn't much traffic.I also suggest you also buy a cpanel for managing tools.Cpanel has a web interface with which you can control every tool using your mouse & keyboard.
On the other hand linode has a CLI interface and their support expects you to have some descent knowledge about managing VPS servers.

Photo and Video hosting on a shared server?

I need to have several videos and photos on my website.
Primarily videos will range to more than a 100, and photos might be more than 10000.
Since i am using a shared server hosting, i cant have enough space to upload them on my server nor will the performance graph be any good.
Hence i decided, i can upload the videos on YouTube and embed them in my web site.
However the problem is with the photographs. Which would be the best photostorage web service which can
A) Have a Web API
B) Would have no need to create a badge or in any way not make it obvious that the photo is from some other source.
C) Unlimited Storage
D) High performance retrieval.
picasa fit all your requirements except unlimited storage. but you have a lot of space and can buy extra storage for little money
I don't know if you want a cloud based service or a self-hosted service?
If you want to self hosted an image hosting service, then you can check this project, ImageS3, web admin console, REST api, and of course, no usage limitation on APIs.
If you wish to use the cloud based image hosting service, then you can use imgur.com, imageshack.com or www.imgix.com.

Hosting web site images: Flickr PRO, Amazon S3 or...?

I'd like to save some of my site monthly bandwidth allocation and I'm wondering if I can use Flickr PRO or I should rely on Amazon S3 as an hosting service for my web site images. (My Web Application allows users to upload their own pictures and at the moment it's managing around 40GB of data)
I've never used Amazon's services and I like the idea of using Flickr REST Api do dynamically upload images from my webApp.
I like also the idea of having virtually unlimited space to store images on Flickr for only 25$/year but I'm not sure if I can use their service on my web site.
I think that my account can be banned if I use Flickr services to store images (uploaded by users of my website) that are not only for 'personal use'.
What's your experience and would you suggest other services rather than Amazon's S3 or is this the only available option at the moment?
Thanks
edit: Flickr explicitly says 'Don’t use Flickr for commercial purpose', you could always contact them to ask to evaluate your request but it sounds to me like I can't use their services to achieve what I want. S3 looks like the way to go then...
Even though a rough estimate of what I'm going to spend every month is still scaring
5000 visit/day
* 400 img/user (avg 50kB/image)
* 30 days
= ~3TB of traffic
* 0.15$/GB (Amazon S3)
= 429$/month
is there any cheaper place to host my images?
400 images per user seems high? Is that figure from actual stats?
Amazon S3 is great and it just works!
A possible cheaper option is Google. Google docs now supports all file types, so you can load the images up to a Google docs folder, and share the folder for public access. The URL's are kind of long e.g.
http://lh6.ggpht.com/VMLEHAa3kSHEoRr7AchhQ6HEzHVTn1b7Mf-whpxmPlpdrRfPW216UhYdQy3pzIe4f8Q7PKXN79AD4eRqu1obC7I
Add the =s paramter to scale the image, cool! e.g. for 200 pixels wide
http://lh6.ggpht.com/VMLEHAa3kSHEoRr7AchhQ6HEzHVTn1b7Mf-whpxmPlpdrRfPW216UhYdQy3pzIe4f8Q7PKXN79AD4eRqu1obC7I=s200
Google only charge USD5/year for 20GB. There is a full API for uploading docs etc
I love amazon S3. There are so many great code libraries (LitS3) and browser plugins (S3Fox) and upload widgets (Flajaxian) that make it really easy to use.
And you only pay for what you use. I use it a lot and have only ever experienced down time on one occasion.
Nivanix is an s3 competitor. I haven't used them, but they have a bit more functionality (image resizing) etc.
Edit:The link about Nivanix is dead now(2015/07/21), because Nivanix was dead.

Questions about Microsoft Azure

I am a web developer that are working on several web applications. For my projects (running in a production environment), I always strive good performance.
So, I have started to look into Microsoft Azure. I have deployed some test-apps and they all work fine. They all run a lot quicker than on my regular shared hosting environment.
My questions are:
1. What should be ran at Azure? Are you suppose to deploy your whole web app (along with images, scripts etc) or are you just suppose to deploy services? (such as WCF)
2. It says "Data transfers within a sub region are free.", but what is a sub region?
3. CNAME works, but is it possible to use A-records of a domain to Azure?
For web sites that are just jQuery slabs calling web services Azure is very easy to adopt. Azure can store any type of file, so for traditional web sites follow this guide
Azure process to Azure process, or Azure SQL etc. May included other non Azure services within the same Microsoft network area. Basically they are saying LAN access if free, whoopee
What would you point you A-Name too? Azure is virtual
Here are the answers I can give you:
It depends on what you want and what kind of (web)application you want to build for Windows Azure. If you're going for fast performance, perhaps it is faster to deploy everything to the cloud (but face the financial costs)
A sub-regio is North-Europe, another one is West-Europe. So data transfering inside North-Europe will be free of charges. But if you have data transfering between North- and West-European hosted application/services you pay for this.
Note: North- and West-Europe form 1 region
Sorry, can't give an answer to this one
Azure is definitely geared to handle more than just hosting web services.
Putting all your web site's static content in Azure storage should enable you to take advantage of the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, which basically replicates your static content out to geo-local caches at the edge of the cloud to reduce network load on your Windows Azure web roles and improves the responsiveness of your web app for your end users scattered around the world.
Read more about the Windows Azure CDN here: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/11/05/introducing-the-windows-azure-content-delivery-network.aspx

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