Storage for photosharing website?

I want to start a photosharing website which would require a lot a storage space in TB%26#039;s

What is the most cost effective solution. Should I go for web hosting or host my on own server? What could be the storage technology?

Also wondering what technologies do yahoo photos! or flicr use

Storage for photosharing website?

With your budget, you are not going to be able to afford much. $2500 will perhaps get you 1TB of SATA storage, but nothing else.

NAS filers are far out of your price range, and you can%26#039;t buy much more than a SAN switch and a single disk + HBA for $2500. There are HBAs which cost $2500, not including disk or switch. NAS isn%26#039;t much cheaper, and is not nearly as scalable. Your best bet for storage at $2500 is a captive direct attach, SATA external enclosure using SCSI -- which won%26#039;t scale.

The right architecture for this would be a SAN w/lots of cheap SATA disk, but you%26#039;d need a substantially larger budget $$$ to be able to do that.

Storage for photosharing website?

This isn%26#039;t a simple question to answer with so few details about your end goals. What%26#039;s your knowledge in relation to web programming, database administration, server administration, and what kind of a budget are you working with?

I have been running some searches, and I can%26#039;t find any hosting companies that will offer you storage space in terabytes. Biggest I could find was in GB. Even rackspace.com doesn%26#039;t have anything advertised.

If you take the route of hosting your own servers, and you are serving content in terabytes, one of your biggest concerns is going to be leasing bandwidth. If you have a popular site that is pulling down a lot of files this that at the end of the day can equal into TB, your bandwidth is going to be HUGE!

Server administration is going to be a big deal if in theory you have terabytes full of content being served. Initially I would suggest going with a linux setup for costs and reliability.

YOu are going to need a database to manage all of your user accounts and photos. Database administration can cost a lot. Depending on what your budget is and how serious you are, you may wanna look at Oracle. You may can slide by with MySql.

Web technologies - Ok here is where you have multiple choices. PHP, Java/JSP, Ruby? I can talk all night about all of these technologies. If you have any experience with web development, you should be able to determine which will meet your goals. I really don%26#039;t have enough information about your goals to answer this.

Unless I do some extensive research into yahoo and flickr, I am not entirely sure what they may be using. I would take a stab and say that most likely they are using some kind of an applicaton program running on their servers that are actually talking to their servers and auto-generating the html etc you are seeing. They could possibly be using java or perl.

There is just too many things to answer in detail. Most everything depends on your existing knowledge.

It is sort of like asking %26quot;How should I obtain a jet, buy or build it from scratch?%26quot;