I believe there are pros and cons for both. Imgur is great because you truly don’t have to think about disk space or bandwidth. Imgur is not great because they can delete your posts at any time without warning and leave holes on the interenet, especially if we’re talking 5, 10 , 20 years from now.
Should I invest in a beefy server to store all of my photo needs without storage anixety? Or should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me? I think I’m already answering my own question by writing this post out, but I’d love to hear from the self hosting community.
deleted by creator
You are talking about your own photos or photos you wanna share with others? If it is the former, with all due respect but I have to say it is insane to put them all to imgur. Heck even uploading them all to Google Cloud is a lot more reasonable… If it is the latter, it is fine as long as you are not expecting the images to live forever.
I’d think that a few terrabytes in a server would mean that you wouldn’t have to worry about image files for a while
There’s another option- cloud hosting in a cloud you control. You can also put a CDN infront of a not-so-beefy home server to avoid getting overwhelmed.
should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me?
No, unless you have a paid contract with them that specifies heavy liability if they decide to screw you