I have a project using MEAN stack that uploads imagefiles to a server and the names of the images to db. Then the images are shown for users of the applications kinda like an image gallery.
I have been trying to figure out an effiecent way of storing the imagefiles. atm im storing them under the angular application in a folder /var/www/app/files
What are the usual ways of storing them in a cloud server like digital ocean, heroku and many others.
Im a bit thrown off by the fact they offer many options for datastorage.
Lets say that hundres of thousands of images were uploaded by the application to the server.
Saving all of them in inside your front end app in a subfolder might not be the best solution? or am i wrong with this.
I am very new to these webserver cloud services and how they actually operate.
Can someone clarify on what would be the optimal solution.
Thanks!
Saving all of them in inside your front end app in a subfolder might not be the best solution?
You're very right about this. Over time this will get cluttered, and unless you use some very convoluted logic, will slow down your server.
If you're using Angular and this is in the public folder sent to every user, this is even worse.
The best solution to this is using something like an AWS S3 Bucket (DigitalOcean has Block Storage and I believe Heroku has something a bit different). These services offer storage of files, and essentially act as logic-less servers. You can set some privacy policies and other settings, but there's no runtime like NodeJS that can do logic for you.
Your Node server (or any other server setup) interfaces with this storage server, and handles most of the fetching and storing of files. You can optionally limit these storage services so they can only communicate with your Node server, so any file traffic would be done through your Node server.
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I'm trying to build a small site that gets its data from a database (currently I use Firebase's Cloud Firestore).
I've build it using next.js and thought to host it on vercel. It looks very nice and was working well.
However, the site needs to handle ~1000 small documents - serve, search, and rarely update. In order to reduce calls to the database on every request, which is costly both in time, and in database pricing, I thought it would be better if the server could get the full list of item when it starts (or on the first request), and then hold them in memory and make data request get the data from its memory.
It worked well in the local dev server, but when I deployed it to vercel, it didn't work. It seems it forces me to work in serverless mode, where each request is separate, and I can't use a common in-memory cache to get the data.
Am I missing something and there is a way to achieve something like that with next.js on vercel?
If not, can you recommend other free cloud services that can provide what I'm looking for?
One option can be using FaunaDB and Netlify, as described in this post, but I ended up opening a free Wix site and using Wix data to store the data. I built http-functions module to provide access to the data via REST, which also caches highly used data in memory. Currently it seems to work like a charm!
I've made a website for an arts organisation. The website allows people to browse a database of artists' work. The database is large and the image files for the artists' work come to about 150Gb. I have my own server that is currently just being used to keep the images on its hard-drive.
I'm going to purchase hosting so I don't have to worry about bandwidth etc... but would it be better to purchase hosting that allows me to upload my entire image database or should I use the website to get the images from my server? If so how would I do that?
Sorry I am very new to this
I think it could be better to have the data on the same server so you avoid calls to another server for images which are quite big as you say and this can slow you down overall.
I assume you will need to set up some API on your server to deliver the images or at least URLs for them but then you must make sure they are accessible.
You'll want the image files on the same server as your website, as requests elsewhere to pull in images will definitely hinder your site's performance - especially if you have large files.
Looking at large size of database and consideration of bandwidth, dedicated server will be suitable as they includes large disk spaces and bandwidth. You can install webserver as well as database server on same server inspite of managing them separately. Managing database backups and service monitoring becomes much more easier.
For an instance, you can review dedicated server configuration and resources here :- https://www.accuwebhosting.com/dedicated-servers
There is this example on amazon, a high traffic web application. I noticed that they are using S3 as their content delivery method. I was wondering if I need to have a Web Server for the content delivery and a Web App for my application. I don't understand why they have 2 web servers and 2 web app in the diagram.
And what is the best way to set up a website that serves images and static contents through S3 and the rest of the content through the regular storage.
My last question is, can I consider S3 as a main storage, reliable enough that I can only keep my static content there and don't have a normal storage as a backup ?
That is a very general diagram, specific diagrams will vary depending on the specifics of the overall architecture.
Having said that, I believe the Web Server represents something like Apache or Nginx and the App Server represent something like Rails, Rack Server, Unicorn, Gunicorn, Django, Sinatra, Flask, Jetty, Tomcat, etc. In some cases you can merge the Web Server and the App Server together like for example deploying Apache with python mod_wsgi to run your Django app. (So depends on Architecture)
what is the best way to set up a website that serves images and static
contents through S3 and the rest of the content through the regular
storage.
There's no really best way other than just point your dynamic content to your Databases (SQL and NoSQL) and point your static files to an S3 bucket (images, css, Jquery code, etc) You can also use third party modules depending on your application stack. For example you can accomplish this in Django with the django-storages module. You can find similar modules for other app stacks like Rails.
My last question is, can I consider S3 as a main storage, reliable
enough that I can only keep my static content there and don't have a
normal storage as a backup ?
S3 is pretty reliable, they provide a 99.999999999% reliability of your data. That goes down if you use their RRS (Reduced Redundancy Storage), but if you want to use it you probably want to back up your data in a non RRS bucket anyways. Anyhow, if it's extremely critical data, you are more than free to backup your data somewhere else just in case.
Notice in the diagram that they also recommend using CloudFront for your static files and this is especially useful if your users will be accessing your application from different geographical areas.
Hope this helps.
If i would want to deploy a site, like ebay, where people will be able to sell something, i would need to store large amounts of images, like many thausends of them and i would need to display about 30 images on some pages.
Normaly i would make a separate server and store them in there, but what else can i do ?
I was trying to store my images on some image hosts like ImageShack, but i have noticed that if i try to request 30 images at same time, some of the images are not showing, looks like imageshack dosnt like to be used this way.
Still there must be some other ways to do it, maybe cloud servers, or other services like imageshack. Does anyone have experience with this ? what would be the best practice beside having a second server ?
Have a file server served by a HTTPD server (e.g. Apache HTTPD) for these static contents.
You can store into the DBMS file locations of the static contents instead of saving as a BLOB this way.
For redirecting traffic, you can store all images (even static files like CSS) in a separate server , like http://staticimg.yourdomain.com . With this way, your web server will be less busy serving download requests.
We're working on developing user widgets that our members can embed on their websites and blogs. To reduce the load on our servers we'd like to be able to compile the necessary data file for each user ahead of time and store it on our Amazon S3 account.
While that sounds simple enough, I'm hoping there might be a way for S3 to automatically ping our script if a file is requested that for some reason doesn't exist (say for instance if it failed to upload properly). Basically we want Amazon S3 to act as our cache and it to notify a script on a cache miss. I don't believe Amazon provides a way to do this directly but I was hoping that some hacker out there could come up with a smart way to accomplish this (such as mod_rewite, hash table, etc).
Thanks in advance for your help & advice!
Amazon doesn't currently support this, but it looks like it might be coming. For now, what you could do is enable logging and parse the log for 404s once an hour or so.
It's certainly not instant, but it would prevent long-term 404s and give you some visibility about what files are missing.