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A Few Website Questions Please

DanH

Legacy Member
Mentor
Photo hosting with commercial providers has some serious issues. The major problem is longevity, and its effect on forum linking. We link photos, something changes at the host service, and all the links go dead. A new host requires inserting a new photo link into each past forum post, a huge time sink.

A number of you have volunteered photo host space in some form or fashion, and I appreciate it very much. However, I'd prefer to make my own way, so to speak. A bit of advice might speed the process, as I know little about web hosting.

The key question is how to post links to photos, and never again change the link. So, check me please.

Assume I purchase a domain name, for example, "danhorton.net". If I understand correctly, I can host that domain on any server willing to rent the drive space. If I wish to change to a different host, I can upload a copy of my website to that new server, and ask that my domain name be linked to the new server address. The key point is that the posted photo URL would not change. For example, a forum link of "http://danhorton.net/photo#1234" would always retrieve photo#1234, no matter what server I use for hosting, now or later.

Have I got it right?
 
Dan -

http://halie.com

You are welcome to a copy of the code, I wrote it. You can set it up on Amazon's EC2 "free tier" for a personal site like you're describing.

Call me if you want the skinny.

- Bill
 
Thanks for the code offer Bill.

Regarding domain and hosting, is my understanding correct? I can change hosts, and the forum links will still work?
 
Thanks for the code offer Bill.

Regarding domain and hosting, is my understanding correct? I can change hosts, and the forum links will still work?

Yes Dan you have it exactly correct. Hollor if you need help further. Least I could do for someone who has provided so much to our viewers.
 
Dan,
You are sort of on the right track. The issue is that at any time the hosting company that you use can stop allowing you to link photos to 3rd party links. Then what happens? You have to find another provider, move your site, and the same may happen in the future. I think Bill has a great idea in using amazon. Not saying that amazon will never change their policy on 3rd party links but at least AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a paid cloud offering that is used by many large enterprises. Many of my customers are moving their entire operations to AWS (cloud datacenter) rather than having brick and mortar datacenter. Why is that relevant to your question? Glad you asked ;) Amazon will likely allow you to do whatever you want as long as you pay for the service. Your other options are Microsoft Azure and Google who both have cloud offerings. You may want try using Bill's code to have your own service on AWS or one of the cloud providers.
 
YEP

<snip>
Assume I purchase a domain name, for example, "danhorton.net". If I understand correctly, I can host that domain on any server willing to rent the drive space. If I wish to change to a different host, I can upload a copy of my website to that new server, and ask that my domain name be linked to the new server address. The key point is that the posted photo URL would not change. For example, a forum link of "http://danhorton.net/photo#1234" would always retrieve photo#1234, no matter what server I use for hosting, now or later.

Have I got it right?
</snip>

I have done exactly that for years. All of my earlier post photos are hosted off of www.langhout.net. Some of my more recent ones are hosted off of google photos - but I've about decided to go back to my own domain.
 
Same here. I have used the same local hosting firm since my earliest web sites over twenty years ago. Every photo I have posted in that time span is still available at the same address (unless I have taken down the parent website). I pay $40/yr for the host service.
 
Dan, yes you got it right. Just get any webhost. I use 1and1.com for a lot of my stuff. Amazon AWS is nice but it's a little hard to figure out for a newbie.
Since you own the domain, you can move it to any host, and put on it whatever you want, and link it from wherever you want. Paid hosts don't care about third parties linking to anything.
Keep it simple. Just upload the images via FTP, and always keep a local copy of them on your computer or backup drive, with the proper names. That way there's no software or databases or anything else to maintain. Host goes down, get a new one, upload the images, point your domain to it and all your image links are back up.
 
Dan,
You are sort of on the right track. The issue is that at any time the hosting company that you use can stop allowing you to link photos to 3rd party links.

Not possible with simple hosting such as Dan was suggesting. If it's just a file on the server, then the only way to block it is to remove access to the folder, at which point your entire site would break. Now, if they're database stored, like some of the images on my wiki, it would be possible to lock them by making them accessible only through your portal software. This is the problem with hosting pictures on most 'image hosting' sites, like photobucket. I'm not really worried about my wiki, however, because I've never heard of an ISP locking a client's content like that and, if they did, I'd simply rehost from my backup with another ISP.

With images and video, there's another issue: bandwidth. If that got out of hand (yeah, like my site is suddenly going to go viral...) then my ISP might block the whole site but they'd be more likely to notify me of the overage and offer to sell me more bandwidth before blocking my content outright. That's not the same thing as not allowing external links.

Wups! Almost forget that http requests from specific domains and sites can be blocked, but this feature is used cautiously to block know spam and torrent sites. Imagine the outcry if an ISP blocked gmail, for instance. I suspect that vansairforce.com and vansairforce.net would not be blocked that way.
 
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wordpress

For stability, I'd recommend using the biggest of everything - like wordpress on one of these hosts:

https://websitesetup.org/best-wordpress-hosting-performance/

I use bluehost, but I suspect that the rest are just as good and cost effective. Just need to point your http://www.danhorton.net and http://danhort.net to the address they give you.

Your URLs will stay the same, and you can set them to whatever you want.

The thing I like about wordpress is I can use the app on my phone to add pictures to my site - just take pictures as you like, then when you have a minute, upload them to the site in an "article" or just as "media" - then you can link to the pictures anywhere you like.

Like others have said, it would be an honor to help you with this - just let me know when's a good time to call you.
 
Thanks guys...this is great. And thank you for all the help offers!

Ok, looks like self study on software choice is next. I'll start by looking at Wordpress (as it seems to be very popular) and comparing it to something like Bill's code.
 
account

Dan, if you would like an admin account on my website I would happy to give you that - you can then play around with it. Just let me know. There may be other ways to test it, like the wordpress company website.

There are lots of solutions, and I recommend going with one of the big ones that manages everything for you so you don't have to spend a lot of time learning how to manage linux to keep your blog running.

Most hosters will just automagically keep the software up to date, and take care of security stuff.

Might also have a look at Google's Blogger - it's quite nice and powerful, but Google is known to pull the plug on things that aren't making them money.
 
AWS

I run an AWS EC2 server for my sister's business, and we also use AWS at my work where I manage the database portion. If you need help spinning up AWS I can help. You can get a trial site for free from them. Amazon has a pricing tool at http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

The main things will be the size of the server (you likely don't need much), the size of storage (if u allow anyone to upload someone is bound to upload muli-GB photos and eat your storage), and the data transfer (which will be related to the size of photos). This is all assuming you spin up a server (which in AWS terminology is EC2 ... elastic compute 2).

Amazon has other services if you just need file storage. With a server you get complete control (and you need to keep the hackers out).

-Bryan
 
Dan, I hope that you and the gang describe what you're doing and learning here, as you proceed, for the sake of others who'd like to know a little about this stuff.

Thanks!

Dave
 
For an understanding of how the connectivity works...

www.DanHorton.net is a domain name (you pay to register), which resolves, via DNS, to an IP address (another service you pay for). The IP address then resolves, via ARP, to a MAC address (network card on the server - the storage you pay for) and the magic is complete.

Clear as mud? :D
 
Might also have a look at Google's Blogger - it's quite nice and powerful, but Google is known to pull the plug on things that aren't making them money.

I have several blogs on Google's Blogger. I also have one just to host pictures. Who knows the future but it's worked (pic links stayed the same) for 10 years. I pay a nominal amount (I think $5/yr?) for extra storage across the Google platform so it's making them a little money.
 
If you just need to store and serve photos and other static files, not run server-based code (like Wordpress) or do any other processing, Amazon?s S3 storage can be configured to serve files directly to the public with no other services or servers required. AWS can be as simple or complex a solution as you want it to be, and you pay for what you use monthly. In the simplest case, that?s a fee for storage and a fee for data transferred to your users.

I would assume the other providers like Google, Azure etc all can do the same too, just my day to day experience is in AWS.
 
Seems to me it would be easier for this forum to do this demonstratively simple process for everyone instead of a couple hundred guys reinventing the wheel. Two forum registrations, the text only registration which would be free as now and the photo hosting registration which would have an annual fee attached?

I realize this would be no better than Photo-bucket for longevity purposes because this forum and all it's content could disappear in a nano second, but most guys are providing photos that have current relevance but if lost would not ruin the continuity of a topic which we have seen many times in the last six months.

If you decide to do your own web/blog site with Amazon or whoever take a word of advise. Even the big guys screw up regularly. I had my business web site on Go Daddy and one day it disappeared. A call to support brought the reply, no problem, a little glitch, all will be fixed in a couple hours. A week later no web site so I moved the site to another provider because Go Daddy could not restore it.

The cardinal rule is back up your site every time you change it onto your hard drive. Next, get a cloud backup provider like Syncplicity ($5.00 a month) to back up your hard drive to the cloud every time you change a file on your hard drive. You will sleep a lot better at night.

Do not be surprised if this post disappears into the great bit box in the sky :)
 
It's pretty standard (I'd say required with most editors) to save your changes before uploading through your FTP and it goes without saying, that your entire hard drive should be backed up on another one or a cloud service if you prefer.
 
Wordpress looks like more than I want at this time. At the other end of the scale, a simple file based approach has merit, but I would not be able to locate each photo myself without knowing the name, or opening the file for a look. What I need is basic gallery software.

Anybody familiar with Piwigo? http://piwigo.org/
 
Wordpress looks like more than I want at this time. At the other end of the scale, a simple file based approach has merit, but I would not be able to locate each photo myself without knowing the name, or opening the file for a look. What I need is basic gallery software.

Anybody familiar with Piwigo? http://piwigo.org/

Over the years I've tried multiple of the opensource image management systems (deployed on my webhost provider) What I've found is the same old problem, they keep changing things and the URL paths change, software goes old and forgotten, etc.

So way back I used manual html and file paths, then 10 years ago I moved to wordpress and have been stable with perma-links there ever since. I run wordpress on a DreamHost account and host everything from my personal site and image links, to my EAA chapter site, and my Airpark HOA site. You don't need to use all the fancy wordpress stuff, just the media bin and link directly to it.
 
Over the years I've tried multiple of the opensource image management systems (deployed on my webhost provider) What I've found is the same old problem, they keep changing things and the URL paths change, software goes old and forgotten, etc.

My gut reaction is that this cat seems readily skinnable. I feel like it wouldn't be too challenging to write a simple script that would examine the contents of a folder, find all the images located therein, and create a super basic index page with a thumbnail of each image.

I envision the user experience being:

  • Creating your own directory structure as you see fit (just like you might on your PC)
  • Uploading files to your web server via one of the many commonly-available FTP clients
  • Browsing through said images using your web browser, where you'd encounter the directory structure set up in step 1

On the flip side of my first paragraph, I'm also aware of many times in my medium-length, not-especially-storied software career where I confidently said, "this will be stupid simple" and the next thing I knew I was coming up for air two weeks later with a confused look on my face.

It's always the edge cases that kill you. Much like kit building, that last 10% or so can be a doozy.
 
I'll put another plug in for SmugMug. It's like $72 a year for the "Power" plan which allows you to use your own domain name. I've had my "overthehills.com" domain parked there for over a decade. Unlimited storage. Easy to link your photos to forums. Galleries/Folders/Pages are easy to create and upload to. Infinitely customizable. It fits my needs, and I have over 25,000 of photos uploaded -- many public and some private. You get to choose your level of protection. You can even reorganize your photos and it won't break links you might have posted on a web site like VAF.
Here's a referral link.
 
agree completely

Over the years I've tried multiple of the opensource image management systems (deployed on my webhost provider) What I've found is the same old problem, they keep changing things and the URL paths change, software goes old and forgotten, etc.

So way back I used manual html and file paths, then 10 years ago I moved to wordpress and have been stable with perma-links there ever since. I run wordpress on a DreamHost account and host everything from my personal site and image links, to my EAA chapter site, and my Airpark HOA site. You don't need to use all the fancy wordpress stuff, just the media bin and link directly to it.
Agree completely - been doing this for over 30 years, so no problems technically to "roll my own", but I'm happy I switched over to something that someone else is managing. I prefer to use my very limited time to build and fly and hang out with my girls - and check out VAF! :)
 
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