Should we use Spaces or Droplet SSD to serve many small images?

July 30, 2019 105 views
DigitalOcean
stevenz
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stevenz

Our website contains > 500k small (< 1mb) images and we want to achieve the best possible performance when serving them. Many of them are thumbnail pictures for search results similar to the images that appear when you search on imdb.com. We are currently using Spaces and its CDN for these images, but we read that Spaces is designed for storing and serving moderate to large files. Would we be better off just using our droplet's SSD for the images? We are also using Cloudflare for caching.

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1 Answer
alexgeorgiev July 31, 2019

Hello, stevenz

I've used both and to be honest both have advantages, basically it's totally up to you and your needs. In your case you're using space to host the images of your website.

If the images are taking a lot of disk space you can keep them separate from the website's droplet.

Spaces are using object storage and the droplets rely on block storage. (someone can correct me if I'm wrong)

You can follow this article:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/object-storage-vs-block-storage-services

Everything is explained in details - advantages, disadvantages and brief explanation of each type of storage.

Alex

Object Storage vs. Block Storage Services
by Brian Boucheron
Flexible and scalable data storage is a baseline requirement for most applications and services being developed today. With today's complex deployments, containers, and ephemeral infrastructure, the days of simply saving files to disk on a single server are gone. Cloud providers have developed services to fill the storage needs of modern application deployments, and they mostly fit into two categories: object storage, and block storage.
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