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.

Object storage saves large volumes of unstructured data, so it’s ideal for:

1. Content distribution: Object storage’s low latency and high storage limits simplify image hosting for creators. These large data stores make it easy for CDNs to quickly distribute content across global server networks and with plenty of storage to support large transaction quantities.

2. Media and entertainment: Object storage is a cost-effective option for professional image hosting and rich media files because of its scale and replication features. Using object storage for media ensures that image resolution stays consistent and doesn’t deteriorate during transfer or storage.

3. Data backup and archiving: A main object storage feature is long-term data retention. It can replace on-premises storage and disk archive infrastructure and make it much easier to store, access, secure, and analyze data. You and your team can also share native file formats across locations, making it easy to recover images during disaster recovery operations.

4. Cloud-native applications: These applications produce a lot of data, requiring storage that can easily scale and quickly store information. Object storage can easily match growing data needs and replicate it across storage buckets for consistent UX and performance.

What is image hosting?

Image hosting is a service that lets individuals and businesses upload their visual content online for easy access and sharing. The image hosting service stores the files or photos on a remote server, saving and storing these files so you can create direct links between them to your website or application without hosting 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.

Hosting providers also typically offer more security than photo-sharing platforms. This can prevent bad actors from accessing your original files and ensure that what you embed on your website or other applications is performant and doesn’t break or error out.

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 file system. 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 and block storage?

Block storage and object storage systems typically provide file system-like abstractions over distributed storage infrastructure, allowing you to achieve higher performance, redundancy, and scalability than 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, 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.

Which is faster, block storage or object storage?

Block storage provides high performance and low latency, which makes it best suited for high-transaction applications with many small files, such as databases and high-performance computing tasks.

Object storage can be slower than block storage but is best suited for data retrieval use cases with CDNs and big data analytics. Depending on the application, it can also be more scalable than block storage.

What are the benefits of image hosting with a CDN?

A CDN is a network of edge servers that deliver content to users. Each point of presence (PoP), the location of a group of edge servers, sends content to the users that are physically closest to it. Using a CDN additionally provides a layer of redundancy for websites; a CDN PoP can serve cached content to users even if the origin or other PoPs are down.

DigitalOcean’s Spaces automatically comes with a CDN to increase image quality, reduce latency, and distribute content across 200+ global servers.

Why should I choose DigitalOcean for image hosting?

DigitalOcean provides multiple storage options, specifically our Spaces product for object storage and our Volumes product for block storage. These products are designed for ease of use and are suited to host multiple file types, including large AI/ML datasets, video, software, backup files, and logs. Spaces is easy to set up, scalable, has a 99.99% SLA, and provides extensive support.

Our Spaces product is designed to optimize your object storage, and you can set everything up and start image hosting in no time. Plus, you can access a CDN at no additional charge—which works to optimize your files and cache them across 200+ distributed servers for fast access and minimal latency.

Can I back up my images on DigitalOcean?

Though Spaces does not offer native backup, there are plenty of options to backup files locally or transfer files to backup tools such as SnapShooter or GoodSync.

How much does it cost for image hosting on DigitalOcean?

The base rate for a Spaces subscription is $5 per month, and it allows you to create multiple Spaces buckets. It includes 250 GiB of data storage (cumulative across all of your buckets). Additional storage beyond this allotment is $0.02/GiB per month at $0.01/GiB for additional transfers. If you cancel your subscription by destroying all your buckets, your bill is prorated hourly.

The Spaces CDN is available at no additional cost. The transfer allowance that comes with the base Spaces subscription covers both CDN bandwidth and origin bandwidth. Transfer between the origin and the edge servers is calculated as part of the transfer allowance.

How do I set up image hosting on DigitalOcean?

Access this quick-start guide to start hosting images with Spaces. Check out this how to upload custom images page to learn how to load custom images with DigitalOcean.

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.