At A Crossroads for Image Hosting

We started doing Image Hosting, and honestly it’s been quite a hit. We’ve had lots of use, and very little abuse. So far we’re at about 550 Gb worth of images, which is incredible. Thank you to everyone for participating.

In anticipation of us moving to both image and video hosting, we started some research and found what we considered to be a low-cost online storage. This way the storage is available even if Squidge goes down.  But we’ve not crossed the one-month mark in our hosting and I found out our next bill is estimated to be MORE than US$200 – FOR A SINGLE MONTH.

This is unsustainable. We managed just about $3,000 in donations last year, up from about $2600 the year before. Our webhosting costs have been our biggest expense, outside of the $400/year that we have to lay out for legal expenses. There’s literally no way in our current environment to continue this. If we had to pay out more than $200 per month on top of our existing basic expenses, we would need to take in almost double what we have been taking in. We would need $4,780 just to meet the bare minimum of these three expenses alone.  And there’s nothing saying that the image hosting costs won’t skyrocket from here.

So we’re at a crossroads. What I think we should do is cancel our online storage and go back to doing all our image hosting ourselves. We can do this – but the problem comes with the fact that if we go down for any reason (and long-time users may remember – we have been down up to 10 days in the past!) image hosting will be down as well.

Before we do anything, I would like people’s opinions on the situation. Are we good with going it alone again? We’ll just need the cost of a new server (which we already have) plus hard drive enclosure, RAID software and two large disks plus the cost of off-site backups. It may have a larger up-front cost ($1,200 or so) but that would be it. Or, do we close image hosting to new users and limit what people can upload?

Please share your thoughts.