Please explain how hosting photos within the forum works. Does that get crazy expensive?

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

@AvidLearner

I assume photos are stored within my Digital Ocean droplet. So does that mean I need to have enough storage space with Digital Ocean to accommodate the amount of data these photos take up?

Correct, you can alternatively host photos with DigitalOcean Spaces (setup guide) or Amazon on their S3 service (setup guide), which would reduce costs for more storage dramatically.

You also have settings in Discourse to reduce maximum allowed image size, which will ensure you don’t have people uploading overly large images that will take up tons of storage space.

Some guesstimate math from a previous topic:

@codinghorror

On a “typical” Digital Ocean steady state install of Discourse, with the 1GB / 30GB minimum, I am seeing:

30.9% used of 29.40 GB = 9.08 GB used, 20.32 GB free

20.32 GB / 3 MB = 6,773 full size (3mb) images
20.32 GB / 2 MB = 10,160 medium size (2mb) images

So if you have say, 1000 members, and they upload on average 3 images per year per user (3,000 images/year), assuming an “average” image size of 2mb, that means you’d run out of disk space in about 3 years.

Clearly it depends heavily on

• size of your community
• what they are uploading
• how often they are uploading

But there’s some back of the envelope calculations that seem reasonable to me.

So extending that math into DigitalOcean Space’s 250GB for $5/mo… if you had 1,000 users uploading 3 images a year at 3MB each… you’d be covered for around 27 years.