Image hosting from home NAS (Synology)

almalino

I have a rather good optical network connection at home (currently 100/50 but I can easily bump it to 1000/500). I was wondering how that idea sounds like: host all flarum user images/files at my home on home NAS? This way I illuminate the need to pay for images/files storage/transfer on AWS S3 utilizing already existing optical connection I have at home. I do not use it at full potential anyway.

Can this be cheaper than using cloud image hosting?

davwheat

almalino

fof/upload already supports local image storage.

If you're hosting your forum locally, I would guess that you could mount your NAS on your local network and symlink the uploads folder in assets to a folder on your NAS.

If you wanted to use another domain or if you aren't hosting your forum locally, then you'd need to create an upload adapter.

Hari

almalino we are in same boat ⛵

Intially I thought connecting other host would resolve it .. but in long run its big headache.

Imgur is offering free unlimited access for commercial use too once go through this https://discuss.flarum.org/d/27420-imgur-commercial-usage-integration-with-fof-upload

Imgur is the best solution for images. But if you you are looking to host videos ..etc I think Amazon is better and cheaper.

I do have a Synology it could go down if there is no internet or power failure.

almalino

It can be a matter of writing additional adapter for https://discuss.flarum.org/d/4154-friendsofflarum-upload-the-intelligent-file-attachment-extension

rob006

How many storage and traffic do you need? I feel like it is not wort the trouble for small forums (even cheap hosting should handle this, and you could always try to setup free CDN using B2 and Cloudflare combo), and for bigger forum you need something more reliable than NAS at home.

almalino

rob006 I do not know yet but people here reporting paying like 7 USD/month for S3 for a small forum with little amount of images on S3. I could imagine this sum growing very fast with a bigger forum and this is where saving with home NAS or home server could be worth it.

Friend of mine host a user photo album of huge PhpBB based forum from home. It is cheaper for him than buying a cloud storage. but he does not give me any figures on numbers. So I was wondering if it makes sense at all 🙂

Also this could be cheap entrance into flarum with images when you do not need to pay anything for image hosting at least n the beginning.

rob006

almalino Also this could be cheap entrance into flarum with images when you do not need to pay anything for image hosting at least n the beginning.

It is free only if your time is free, and it usually doesn't. 🙂 I have a bad experience with home-made hosting. For small forum I would rather start with local storage on your hosting where you run Flarum, a then decide if transfer/storage is real problem. Or try with Backblaze behind Cloudflare if your hosting charges you extra for transfer - free tier on B2 should be enough for small forum if Cloudflare will handle most of traffic. And it should scale much better, since data transfer is like 10 time cheaper on B2 than S3 on AWS.

ihhddis

rob006 I can't get FoF Upload to work with BackBlaze B2.

I have configured everything and it doesn't work I don't know what to do, how did you get it to work? I've been trying for hours

Nothing happens I just get the red toast from flarum that says "Oops! Something went wrong. Please reload the page and try again."

In the console I get an error in api/fof/upload if I go to the web address it says this: {"errors":[{"status": "405", "code": "method_not_allowed"}]}

Do you think you could help me? thanks

almalino

davwheat Tha an interesting idea and this could be done! This will eliminate storage cost. Now I am wondering how to eliminate transfer cost as in this way transfer will still be done from flarum server to client machine.

rob006

ihhddis I never really tried it with Flarum, there might be some problem with S3 integration in fof/upload extension.

EDIT: According to https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047425453-Getting-Started-with-the-S3-Compatible-API only S3 API v4 is supported, so league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3 might not support it.

almalino

Hari I think problem with imgur is that you cannot delete image if you want to. What if user requested to delete all his images due to EU GDPR?

Hari

almalino Image Deletion api > https://api.imgur.com/endpoints/image/#image-delete

I think no one can beat Imgur image hosting .. its free for commercial use and it's fast, all we need is implementation..

do add +1 here FriendsOfFlarum/upload264 & FriendsOfFlarum/upload7 🙂

almalino

Hari I should try that! Thanks! I use imgur on my forum I was just worried about EU GDPR and image deletion.