Image hosting on DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean provides hosting for anyone looking to get highly scalable and affordable object storage for their projects or businesses. Hosting provided through Spaces, DigitalOcean’s object storage product, includes a built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), excellent performance for applications requiring high requests per second (RPS), simplicity with multiple file upload, drag-and-drop management, data transfer automatically encrypted with secure HTTPs, and an S3-compatible API.

Hosting through Spaces is ideal for many use cases including storing static assets and unstructured data, video streaming, software delivery and file sharing, and storing backups. Learn more about how to quickly upload pictures and get started with the Spaces configuration best for you.

What does it mean to host images?

This is the act of uploading pictures or other content such as videos or other file types to a specific website or other kind of application. The image hosting service is a company like DigitalOcean that can store the files or pictures you’re seeking to upload on a remote server, saving and storing these files so you can create direct linking between these to your website or application without having to host them yourself. Hosting providers make it easy for you to embed your uploaded images into whatever you are building on the web or in an application, from a simple personal blog site to a global mobile application with millions of users.

Generally, image hosting providers make it easy to store images on their servers and then to direct link those images back to your application. Compared to photo sharing platforms,hosting providers will let you embed the content you’ve hosted on a wide range of websites and applications, while simple photo sharing platforms typically won’t allow you to share beyond the confines of that same platform.

Hosting providers also typically offer more security than photo sharing platforms. Not only can this prevent bad actors from accessing your original files, but these service providers can also make sure that what you embed on your website or other application is performant and doesn’t break or error out.

There are free image hosting companies out there that may promise unlimited space or unlimited uploads, but be cognizant of the differences in security, access, and ownership between these and paid services. You should expect to pay a fee for secure image hosting that comes with unlimited space and unlimited uploads.

What is object storage?

Object storage, sometimes also called object-based storage, is a way of storing your content as ‘objects’ rather than as files on a conventional filesystem. Object storage services can scale to accommodate massive amounts of content, which is what makes them ideal for storing images in large-scale web applications.

What is the difference between object storage, file storage, and block storage?

Block storage and object storage systems typically provide filesystem-like abstractions over distributed storage infrastructure, allowing you to achieve a higher degree of performance, redundancy, and scalability than you could get with conventional file storage.

The main difference is how they are designed to be used. Object storage is good for discrete, immutable objects like images (or an image feature), whereas block storage is more suitable for write-intensive applications and granular access—things like databases, log files, and general file storage.

Both types of storage can be used for different things in the same web application. For example, a social networking service might use block storage to store information about users’ posts while using object storage to store and serve images. The best option for you will depend on what your needs are.

DigitalOcean can provide each of these kinds of storage, particularly our Spaces product for object storage and our Volumes product for block storage.

What happens when I need help, or no longer need hosting?

It’s easy to get started with image hosting. Visit the hosting provider you’ve chosen to use and review their documentation for how to get started.

DigitalOcean is a great option! Our Spaces product was designed to optimize your object storage. To learn how to upload a custom image using DigitalOcean, check out this how-to. If you are interested in learning how to use our Spaces object storage product, we also have this great quickstart guide. And if you still need additional support with your image upload, DigitalOcean also has a great Support team that can guide you through the above or any other steps to get you started.

If you no longer need hosting or are looking to switch providers, typically all you have to do is cancel your product subscription to whatever provider you’re using. Just be careful that you’ve saved all your content somewhere else before you end your service to avoid losing your files.