Question
Can I use volumes block storage on my droplet to serve large videos on my website
- Posted on October 22, 2020
- DigitalOcean VolumesBlock StorageNginx
Asked by leandroprada
I have a website whose main purpose is static content, but part of it is LARGE video files, can I mount a volume and somehow host the videos from that volume?
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While you can certainly setup your own webserver and serve media files from a Block Volume backed Droplet, I would not recommend that if you plan on making these video files public. If a video goes viral you’re going to run into performance issues as a single droplet is just not going to be able to serve that kind of load.
You may want to look at the Spaces product https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/ to host the video files, as Spaces has CDN (Content Delivery Network) integration that should scale to most workloads.
Hi there @leandroprada,
Yes, what you could do is mount the volume to your upload folder, that way whenever you upload files they would be stored on the volume rather than the local filesystem.
You can take a look a the documentation on how to do that:
https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/volumes/how-to/mount/
When running the mount command you just need to change the
/mnt/example_mount_pointpath to match your upload path.Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby
Block storage volumes are network-based block devices used to power the server with additional storage volumes. It is the hardware providing space to store data and perform read/write operations, just like traditional storage solutions such as Solid State Drive (SSD), Hard Disk Drive (HDD), etc.