I remember saying that Linode's the wrong place for storing pictures. However, since you're asking for alternatives, why not find a few likeminded individuals, rent one of them $50 Atom servers with a 500GB disk and resell that space with simple NFS exports (or whatever remote FS blows your hair back).

If you sell each 100GB for $10/m, four of your clients can each get a very good deal on 100GB of storage and you'll be out of pocket $10/m for the last 100GB of storage (minus small overheads, of course). Bonus points if you get the server in the same DC where Linode hosts.

Me, I "host" all my pictures with Google's Picasaweb. For 20GB of storage I pay $5 a year and get all the other goodness along with it (location tagging, free bandwidth, easy sharing and exceptionally easy uploading and management of that process).

--deckert

But unless you hack the gallery code to emit hotlinks to the storageserver, you're paying for twice the bandwidth. That Atom machine won't be on Linode's internal free-transfer network.

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rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

That assumes that a personal photo gallery would be bandwidth limited.

I still think the best option would be for Linode to offer a SAN service accessible over the private network. Customers get some very high performance local storage, and then can affordably supplement that with cheap lower performance network bulk storage.

If you mostly need photo storage, consider google's Picasa + paying for extra space.
It works out to ~2c/gb/mo - much cheaper than rackspace or S3. Of course it doesn't have the same flexibility, though..

https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage
80 GB = ($20.00 USD per year)

Is there a way to transfer Gallery photo albums into Picasa, retaining all of the structure and markup that was present in Gallery?

I've been using Picasa to manage my photos. It's OK, but I have two main complaints. First, it seems extremely difficult to manage your photos through the web interface, only the desktop app is practical for that. I couldn't even figure out how to move multiple photos between albums. Maybe there's a way, but it certainly isn't by dragging, they don't make it easy.

Second, I'm always hesitant to show people photos on my Picasa album, because it shows people super low bitrate JPEGs of your photos. Parts of my photos that, when viewing the original image, have a pleasant grain, instead get blocky artifacting when people view it on Picasa.

I doubt it...




Picasa asks you what size you want to upload. I've had no problems with that. Perhaps you should try uploading at a higher resolution?

Picasa does have a "sync" feature, but otherwise, I've not tried to move stuff around too much.

I uploaded the full resolution version, and I can see it through Picasa. The problem is the picasa web viewer, which does dynamic resizing, outputs extremely low quality JPEGs. So the user sees a very poor quality version unless they zoom all the way into the image. As such, Picasa is pretty bad for showing your photos to people.

Well thanks for all of the great suggestions. For the moment the best solution for me was to upgrade to a Linode 1024. While I would love to move my very costly gallery2 site to some other service, nothing duplicates gallery2's functionality and moreover, it would be very difficult to migrate our existing albums to another service. Believe me, if I knew that gallery2 would end up holding me hostage in this way I never would have chosen it for hosting my photos in the first place ...

I would seriously consider any fast-ish local network storage available to a Linode in the Dallas datacenter, but haven't heard of any yet.

And I would still really appreciate it if Linode could upgrade their disk plans. Disks have twice the capacity for the cost that they had a year or two ago but Linodes still have the same space for the same cost. And please do not take this as an opportunity to try to educate me on why Linode disks cost more than consumer hard drives; I know about all of the great reliability features of Linode disks, but I also know that with all 'fixed' costs aside, cost per unit disk space for drives falls faster than Linode's prices for disk space ever have.

Oh - and in praise of Linode, this is twice in the past two weeks that I've upgraded my Linode (from a 512 to a 768 to a 1024) and both times it was so seamless and painless.

Do you buy a new hard drive every time prices fall?

Then perhaps we can educate you on the costs involved in upgrading every single legacy host... While newer drives are certainly cheaper, those drives don't magically appear in the thousands of hosts Linode maintains.

Then why not have newer hosts come with more storage and allow people to pay a reasonable amount to upgrade to the higher storage plan? Meaning why not provide an 'upgrade' to a Linode 768 that provides 1.5X or even 2X the storage but requires migrating to a new host?

Thinking that all hosts have to be upgraded at the same time is not thinking very creatively about the problem.

If I answer 'yes', how will that be relevent to the fundamental point of my post?

If I answer 'no', how will that be relevent to the fundamental point of my post?

FYI, in the past, Linode has offered disk space upgrades when not all older hosts have the capacity for it, offering migrations to other hosts when necessary.

I am confident that Linode is aware of how much everyone wants more disk space and will offer it when feasible.

Edit: Thanks to the magic of RAID, they could upgrade a host to larger drives live.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

I know that the real answer is no, so why would you expect linode to magically have the money to buy new disks every couple months?



This already exists, upgrade to the next plan. Further fragmenting their plans would be a disaster management-wise and marketing-wise.