AWS S3 buckets could be a possible option. There is a way to mount a bucket as a directory. It can get expensive if you have a lot of up and down traffic, but there is a fee tier.

I checked it out, using reduced redundancy storage it would cost me somewhere between $2 and $16 per month, depending on how much storage I’m using and how much data is transferred, which is acceptable. Would it be relatively simple to use my 20GB until it starts to get full, then replace the directory storing the media with one linked to AWS?

Here are my calculations:
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#r=IAD&s=S3&key=calc-0906CA41-2034-4160-A2D5-AB9204EF61BF
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#r=IAD&s=S3&key=calc-1B4E3F54-453F-426C-BE4E-CF315CF06E68

I have been playing with this storage today: https://www.runabove.com/storage/object-storage.xml

I was able to mount their storage as a folder, and so far it seems to be working fine. The price is much better than AWS, at .01 cent per GB.

If I were you I would not fill up my 20gb droplet. You can start running into issues if your OS does not have much space left, and can take a performance hit.

You will probably do better to start exploring other options now while you have not used up your existing space..

Also, be sure to vote on extra storage options as a feature in DO:
http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/6662293-s3-object-storage-alternative

or:

http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3127077-extra-diskspace-

I looked at their website. Is it $0.01 per GB transfered out, or $0.01 per GB of storage used + $0.01 per GB transfered out?
Could you show me how to mount their storage as a directory? I’m new to web development; I’m not even sure where nodebb stores the uploaded files (but I imagine that won’t be hard to figure out). And yeah I wasn’t planning on filling all 20GB, it just hasn’t been deployed to the users yet so I won’t be filling up anything for a little while, but in any case I was going to see how long it took to get to 15GB and then figure it out.

I will vote on that.

I am working on doing a write-up how-to. I will also do one for Amazon S3. I will post back here when I have it done (probably later tonight)

Awesome, thank you!

Sorry for the delay. I finished writing up a tutorial on how to mount an AWS bucket to a folder on your server:

https://firefli.de/tutorials/s3fs-and-aws.html

Let me know if that works for you, and if you have any feedback.

Thanks, much appreciated.
I’d try it now, but I really don’t need the extra storage. If Amazon charges per GB, can I just have <1GB and pay a couple cents per month, or is there a minimum?