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I have developed a mobile app, that lists some date with images. Currently the images are hosted on the same server where the services reside, but as the number of images rises I would like to unload them to a different server.

I have looked up for cloud providers (I reside in Europe) and the best so far is Rackspace UK. The ping from my country to their cloud is around 85ms (my customers are just from one country). Where the ping to my current dedicated server is 40ms.

My questions are:

  1. Should I get another dedicated server (where ping is 40ms) and run an image server? if so what web server do you suggest for the sole purpose of hosting image content?

  2. Should I ignore the ping and go with cloud? Can this difference be noticed on mobile connection?

Thank you for your time, all help is appreciated.

Adnan
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  • ovh has hosting facilities in Prague and Warsaw. Don't know from what country your customers are, but this could be 'closer' than rackspace. – petrus Jun 14 '11 at 21:37

2 Answers2

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So mobile app.. chances are you'd never notice a 40ms ping difference. I'm a creator for photoblog.com and we did our own image servers before s3 was around. It was a pain for these reasons

  1. scaling out.. need more disk
  2. backups

By the time you deal with backups its well cheaper to go with a cloud option. Whenever we ran out of space on one server we'd have to get another server and that just added to the worring if it was going to crash.

The bonus to s3 for us is if we ever want to go the cdn route we just enable cloudfront and change our image urls.

Mike
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When you tested Rackspace, were you looking at their Cloud Servers or Cloud Files for your image server? With Cloud Files you automatically have access to the Akamai CDN which may help with speed of delivery depending on where your users are.

More information about Cloud Files can be found here.

Rob
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