For a few dollars you can increase the storage available. I think 7,000 images is enough to be getting on with, it can always be bumped up at a later date.6,000 songs
7,000 photos
100 hours of video
125,000 Word Documents
25,000 PowerPoint Presentations
200,000 spreadsheets
Never heard of it - have you Googled reviews of it?gflex1 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 14, 2018 5:54 pm Thank U all for the help. I found over the internet https://www.cloudinary.com Is this good service?
Oooh! So an external hosting service can be sort of integrated into phpBB? That sounds great.Lumpy Burgertushie wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:52 pm there are a couple of extensions here to add a hosting service link to the posting page.
check them out.
robert
We have had vanishing images on the forum I help administer.david63 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 7:08 pm The problem with any hosting service for images/files is that they are liable to disappear overnight, or change their T&C's, and everything is then lost.
If the issue is with space then I would suggest that the long term solution is to buy/acquire more space and host the files yourself.
I paid for a 2 GB phpBB hosting package, for three years, but it looks like I need to move over to something like this later. Our hosting company has options to upgrade to 5 GB and 10 GB, but that's it.Mick wrote: ↑Wed Mar 14, 2018 11:08 am I’ve just seen a ‘proper’ host has a package free for the first year with 25gb of storage. Somebody asked the question how many images can you store with 25gb, I figure this is guesstimated as it’s relative but this was the reply:
For a few dollars you can increase the storage available. I think 7,000 images is enough to be getting on with, it can always be bumped up at a later date.6,000 songs
7,000 photos
100 hours of video
125,000 Word Documents
25,000 PowerPoint Presentations
200,000 spreadsheets
Thanks Kypreo.KYPREO wrote: ↑Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:14 am Host it yourself. Whatever size requirements you have scales with the popularity/size of your board. Even if you expect a few hundred images, we're only talking about 10-20MB based on average image size of 100kb. This is easy to achieve with plupload and sensible image size limits in the ACP.
We have had attachments enabled on our board since 2007. In that time we have amassed over 42,000 attachments but this only takes up a bit over 4GB. On my host every additional gigabyte only costs US$0.50 per month so it's a minimal expenditure. And that is for a very large board with generous image size limits (1440px wide images). F
We have got unlimited bandwidth, but it doesn't make sense to have pages grinding to a halt if a user puts a ton of massive pictures in a single topic. I'll have to try to find out how your thumbnails work.KYPREO wrote: ↑Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:14 amThe risk and consequences of third party hosts taking down user's photos or holding them to ransom cannot be understated - this had catastrophic consequences for users on my board with 40 page topics full of images completely destroyed. Best to control the images yourself and encourage your users to use it.
The server load can be managed to a large degree through use of thumbnails & lightbox, limits limiting image attachment size and the numbers of attachments per post. You can also set locally hosted images to cache with very long expiry periods as well as compression.
viewtopic.php?f=616&t=2420316 (IMHO the best available, but has numerous timeouts of late)Big Mac wrote: ↑Sun Apr 08, 2018 3:35 pm This is a very interesting topic.
Oooh! So an external hosting service can be sort of integrated into phpBB? That sounds great.Lumpy Burgertushie wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:52 pm there are a couple of extensions here to add a hosting service link to the posting page.
check them out.
robert
I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how to get the search system to help me search the Extensions page on the Customisations Database. I keep seeing what looks a bit like a forum topic.
I had a dedicated server for about 10 years which had a 320GB HDD. I just switched this year to a self-managed VPS from the same provider which was significantly cheaper, but has smaller storage (although it's SSD). Default storage is 30GB but being Windows Server 2016, that is quickly taken up, so I've added more. I'm still tweaking performance but pretty happy with it. With a database my size, shared hosting solutions are very limited so self-managed solutions provide better value (although require much more work from the admin).Big Mac wrote: ↑Sun Apr 08, 2018 3:35 pmThanks Kypreo.KYPREO wrote: ↑Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:14 am Host it yourself. Whatever size requirements you have scales with the popularity/size of your board. Even if you expect a few hundred images, we're only talking about 10-20MB based on average image size of 100kb. This is easy to achieve with plupload and sensible image size limits in the ACP.
We have had attachments enabled on our board since 2007. In that time we have amassed over 42,000 attachments but this only takes up a bit over 4GB. On my host every additional gigabyte only costs US$0.50 per month so it's a minimal expenditure. And that is for a very large board with generous image size limits (1440px wide images). F
It sounds like your forum makes for a very useful case study!
I'll have to have a look at your forums, to see what the user experience is like there. The forum I help look after started in 2008, so I'm guessing there would be a similar user experience if we had done what you have done (if we had similar levels of traffic to you).
It sounds like you have a great hosting provider there. I think I'm going to be locked down to my own hosting company for the next two and a half years (and I don't have the energy to try migrating to another server in the near future) but it looks like I'll have to make up a checklist of things to look for in a phpBB host.
I don't actually use lightbox or thumbnails - I have the full image displayed and it hasn't been a problem. Lightbox is an extension. It will provide an exploded full size picture in any overlay (rather than in the browser tab) when you click on the thumbnail. This saves bandwidth/server load if images are hosted locally, because only the thumbnail is loaded until a user clicks on it.Big Mac wrote: ↑Sun Apr 08, 2018 3:35 pmWe have got unlimited bandwidth, but it doesn't make sense to have pages grinding to a halt if a user puts a ton of massive pictures in a single topic. I'll have to try to find out how your thumbnails work.KYPREO wrote: ↑Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:14 amThe risk and consequences of third party hosts taking down user's photos or holding them to ransom cannot be understated - this had catastrophic consequences for users on my board with 40 page topics full of images completely destroyed. Best to control the images yourself and encourage your users to use it.
The server load can be managed to a large degree through use of thumbnails & lightbox, limits limiting image attachment size and the numbers of attachments per post. You can also set locally hosted images to cache with very long expiry periods as well as compression.
What does the lightbox do? I thought that was just about having a black screen around an image? How does that cut down on server load? Do people have to click on thumbnails to surf over to a lightbox for each picture? (I see a "Thumbnails" option in the ACP, but not a "Lightbox" option. Is it an extension?)
I thought that image caching was just something that end-users had control over. Can image caching be set in the ACP? Or do I have to use something else (like .htaccess) to control image caching?
I second this, particularly if your forum is rather large. For a smaller to average forum self-hosting (using the normal attachment system) is normally fine. If you have a huge board you might also think about using a service to optimize image sizes.John connor wrote: ↑Fri May 04, 2018 3:23 am I use the AWS extension and all attachments are uploaded to AWS. If you don't have tons and tons of pulls and gets and the storage is less than 5 GB, then you won't pay anything. Go above that and it will only be pennies a month. I have also used imgur on my other forum where I don't allow attachments and so far all of my pics have remained. Even after a few years.
With plulupload phpBB will all ready do this. It resizes them client side before upload to whatever you have set the max dimensions. I also have had a custom mod gong back to to 2007 that will resize them server side, that only occurs now if the user does not have JS enabled .jpg has siding scale for compression usually labeled quality, On line 269 of /phpbb/plupload/plupload.php you'll find this:Wes of StarArmy wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 3:30 pm If you have a huge board you might also think about using a service to optimize image sizes.
Code: Select all
'resize: {width: %d, height: %d, quality: 85, preserve_headers: false},',
Code: Select all
quality: 85
preserve_headers: false
is added by me, it will prevent issues with sideways thumbnails. It doesn't appear to work with pluplaod version 2.3.3 used by phpBB uses but I'm using 2.3.6 with no apparent issues.