Ask HN: Web application (primarily image based) hosting - S3?
I'm looking to deploy my startup on a scalable solution and was hoping you experienced folks at HN could give me a few wise words and tips. The start up is effectively an image editing service which will allow users to host the edited images for use wherever. I anticipate about 1 MB storage per edited image including all overheads. I intend to take a freemium approach with a free service for up to X images edited/hosted and a charge beyond that. I will possibly consider in-image advertising on the free images as a source of revenue. The problem is, I have totally no sense of scale for anticipated take up, although doing a few quick calculations for a worst case scenario (no paid subscribers) shows a significant cost per user that can potentially skyrocket in terms of Bandwidth where one simply cannot anticipate demand. How do I deal with this? Do I start off in a private beta on a simple shared/virtual server and then consider dedicated/S3/others? Also, possibly dodgy, but what about considering free image hosting solutions out there for free users on the freemium approach - I realise this is a huge liability - but just thinking about it the porn industry is probably a pretty good paradigm. I have read through the other discussions on HN on AWS/S3/Smugmug etc but they are outdated if I'm not mistaken. Any advice much appreciated, thanks!