I don't want to be that guy but I'm a little bit skeptical here. There is a chance that this service won't become popular and you'll just waste money for nothing because for example, if 10 image is uploaded a day and you have a total of 3650 image in your database, if you just shut down this service, 3650 image will disappear from this forum, which, can be a problem for users. And if you don't shut down, it can become a little bit boring to take care of such service and pay some money out of pocket.
I clearly understand your point of view. By the way, that was the main question that was asked in this topic. If you notice my answers are: than depending on me this project is to last a long, long time.
Note
my story of an online gallery, which I have maintained online for over 10 years. Having an online gallery doesn't scare me and I am aware of the resources needed to keep one up and running.
Sometimes numbers are spoken of in a frightening way. But sometimes it's not like that. My service only accepts images up to 2.5 MB, this makes everything more controlled. Imagine that all forum users (3536195 members), upload a 1MB image, I would need 4GB of disk space. I do technical management of a website that has just over 66k images and occupies 30GB of disk space. By the way, you can visit here:
https://allaircraft.net/Believe me, I would be very happy to have 3000000 images on the site.
But realistically, you would think that all forum users will post 1 MB image, most will upload images under 1 MB. Do you know what is the current average of the images that have already been uploaded? Less than 200KB. Sometimes when talking about an image, you think that everything will take up a lot of space, but remember, I limit everything to 2.5MB.
The biggest problem will be bandwidth, but that's only with time that I'll be able to evaluate the best solutions to apply. At the moment, I have a lot of available bandwidth (20GB/month), which I have the possibility to increase with some ease without major cost changes.
With that, I just want to demonstrate that I'm familiar with this type of site, and I intend to keep the service indefinitely.
Also, don't forget that you may get DMCA complains and you will have to take care of that. I don't really know how it works or if you ever get complains but still i would say that server located in DMCA free area can be a better idea.
I made it clear in the terms of service that all images that violate copyright may be deleted. That is, at the first credible notification, the image is deleted. I'm not going to discuss this kind of thing, because all platforms in the genre do the same thing: they delete everything that violates copyright when they are notified.
I assume it's a hobby. Or maybe he just wanted to the the
top-merited user this month
I'm kidding of course.Yes it's a hobby... My first website
www.jokerartgallery.com came from a school work and is online until today, despite the project having ended. Almost 90% of what I know about websites is thanks to this hobby. Therefore, I believe that any donations and one or two advertisements are enough to continue to feed this hobby.
Regarding the merits, you discovered...
I'm kidding of course. Or not...How the spam control will work? in my country All telecommunications connected network has same IP address. If this website become popular and more than 1k users from our country upload with same IP, will it be catched spam?
Thank you for sharing this, and I will keep an eye out for these types of cases.
Either way, the use of IP will be the most extreme measure I can apply. It would be necessary to enter many (really many) spam images, or outside the rules, for me to analyze this type of blocking. I will always prefer individual moderation for each image.
I tried using it, but the upload is pretty slow and this is gonna lag even further as it becomes a more powerful tool in the future. If it gets crowded then definitely it is going to lag the uploads.
Did you feel slowness on the website? By the way, what was the image you uploaded?
So far, all the records I have have been good response times. Of course, there may be times when it slows down, but there are several factors for this. From your internet connection, or your internet provider, browser or others. Perhaps at peak usage, it can also happen. But I doubt that happened today, as only 12 uploads were made (until this post).
If this service is going to be available for others then I might just publish it amongst my moderation team on the micro-tasking site. They would be happy to see this as users need to upload screenshots all the time. Could use this one effectively. Good luck mate.
As I indicated in the OP, I can authorize the use of the images elsewhere. But in that case I suggest you send a PM so we can talk about it.
But if the website becomes widely known by people outside the forum and more and more users, it is not impossible that a larger capacity will be needed someday and some backups also become quite important when there are some errors that might occur.
The site is configured to only work in this forum. So no matter how popular it is, no one will be able to use the images outside the forum.
Can this option be an option to compress or not?
EXIF is indeed a digital footprint that will lead to the user's location and other information (related to privacy issues).
Compressing can also be done automatically and the image quality remains the same and the file size is reduced.
I have no intentions of creating any image compression system. I don't like loss of quality, and it annoys me to see images that are blurry, disproportionate, full of pixels and the like. I only delete the EXIF data to ensure greater privacy for users.
Furthermore, the limitation of just 2.5MB is more than enough to ensure that the images are of good quality, without being overly large.
Once again thank you for everyone's support! I hope this platform is useful for you.