Image hosting and photo hosting tips

For website owners, image hosting and photo hosting can be a major issue. The unexpected success of a blog post containing an image or the sneaky theft of a hosted image by another website or forum (hotlinking, as it was known back in the day. Inline linking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs are alternative names).

Either way, it is hugely frustrating if you find that your decision to upload an image to illustrate a product or blog post results in your entire website becoming unavailable.

There are three main ways in which you can improve your image hosting arrangements to help avoid that situation:

• Image editing
• Hosting infrastructure
• Content delivery

Image editing

The first way to make your photo hosting more efficient is to give careful consideration to your image editing. Start by resizing the image on your desktop (i.e. before uploading it to your website) to the size at which it will be used on your website. If the space you need to fill is 600 pixels wide, resize your chosen image to be 600 pixels wide.

Next, make sure your file size is as small as possible. The easiest way to do this is to look for a Save For Web or similar option on your image editor. For photo hosting, jpegs are usually a better options the pngs, so reducing the quality of the jpeg can also reduce file size.

Remember that any image that has been created to be suitable for print will be at 300 pixels per inch. A resolution of just 72 pixels per inch is fine for websites, so make that adjustment, too.

There are also online image compression services that will further reduce the size of your files.

Hosting infrastructure

The second way to improve your image hosting is to improve your hosting as a whole. If you have a flexible and scalable hosting infrastructure, your website will be better equipped to cope with the additional strain of an influx of traffic or an imaged being hotlinked.

Some of the cloud infrastructure and services that you might explore include multi-server hosting, private cloud hosting, VPS hosting and colocation hosting. This infographic will help you to decide on the best type of hosting for your requirements.

Content delivery

A very effective way to reduce the strain of photo hosting for a website that is otherwise fairly light on the resources it uses is to implement a content delivery network. This is a separate and specialist piece of hosting functionality that delivers content, in this case images, on your behalf.

Image hosting is shifted away from your main server and to the CDN. The result is that the availability of your website as a whole becomes separate from the delivery of your images. And because a CDN is specifically designed for this purpose, it uses multiple servers and networks to improve performance and availability.