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Comment by mtoohig | Hacker News Reader

Well I have to appreciate the design choice since where I am internet is slow and unreliable. I couldn't imagine having to fetch each photo over the internet just to browse from my own home network.

But there should be a feature to at least sync to a cloud service for backup purposes.

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It's mostly about costs.

I have 1 Tb of pictures.

For example DigitalOcean: 1 Tb volume storage (without the instance) is $100/mo.

S3: $13/mo (most would be infrequent access) + traffic would prob be free (100Gb/mo, I don't think I would read more than that).

I am not interested in single servers that can crash on a low-cost provider that can catch fire, get my account deleted because of a software bug, get stolen at home, etc.

Google drive is 99/yr for 2Tb. You can use a folder synced to google drive as your serving folder and get double the storage.

Of course at that point you might as well just use Google photos

Would it be possible to host on DO Spaces? That's even cheaper than S3 I think. I'm in the same boat, too many images to host them on a Droplet.

Hetzner Storage Box might fit you. Proper host, nice track record, hosted in Europe (probably matters, if you're not there, latency won't be great), unlimited traffic (as long as it's proper traffic) and cheap (no traffic cost nor setup).

- 1TB: 3.81 EUR (100USD cheaper than the DigitalOcean example you made)

- 5TB: 12.97 EUR

- 10TB: 24.75 EUR

- 20TB: 48.31 EUR

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

I've been paying for two 5TBs boxes (+ rsync.net) for my backups for a very long time and had one issue one time when the connection to one of the boxes was degraded, but otherwise it's been painless.

Ok, it's 2/3 times cheaper but the reliability is clunky as it's hosted on a single device.

With S3 I don't really care about what happens, do a snapshot myself, spend time restoring from snapshots etc. It's there. Worth the upgrade to me.

Also, not from Europe, ping not good.

Edit: also read horror stories about Hetzner, in my former jobs had problems with OVH. No service, unreliable.

> Ok, it's 2/3 times cheaper but the reliability is clunky as it's hosted on a single device.

Is it? One of those boxes have been running continuously for 5+ years, according to my monitoring that checks the status every 30 seconds. You can snapshot at your own leisure and it's setup with RAID to resist drive failures.

Or do you actually have something that points to it having troubles with reliability?

Having problems with OVH I don't know what has to do with Hetzner, they are separate companies...

I just mounted a readonly volume for photoprism to use thats all.

And you can backup that folder with whatever you like.

And you can get files to that folder however you want. Including mounting a volume from s3 API location via s3 fuse.

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