A technical question..

I'm a web developer, and I was wondering. Do you use object storage service like AWS S3, or do you simply save all those images on the server? And if you do save them on the server, how do you make it scalable?

The reason I'm asking is, simply, I want to learn..

Thanks in advance..

You shouldn't use AWS S3 for image-heavy projects because it gets expensive quickly, especially with bandwidth costs when you're serving a lot of images..

You should use dedicated storage servers from providers like Hetzner or OVH. They're much more cost-effective for startups - you get several TB of storage for a fraction of AWS costs, and most importantly, bandwidth is either unmetered or very generous..

For scalability, you can use:

• CDN (Cloudflare) to cache images globally and reduce load on origin servers
• Multiple storage servers that you can add as traffic grows
• Efficient image delivery with proper compression and formats

This setup works great - handling tens of thousands of active users without breaking the bank. AWS is powerful but overkill for most projects until you're at massive scale.