Using DO as a file host and delivery server

July 26, 2014 3.2k views
ashishmpatel20
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ashishmpatel20

Hello everyone,

First of all I’m going to warn you I am extremely new to all this and have no experience yet with even managing a server. I’m currently using hostgator’s fully-managed VPS for a large website I have with ~70 GB of images and using ~1 TB of bandwidth a month. Now, because of this I haven’t been able to afford allowing users to download zip files that contain images bundled in one which is one of their biggest requests.

I discovered DO recently and I’m wondering if its possible to use DO as a file host and delivery network (I dont know if CDN would be the right term for this?). Where files.mydomain.com could be a direct link to files on DO while mydomain.com could still be hosted on hostgator’s VPS. I use cloudflare at the moment and I’m not sure if that would change how I have to manage getting this all setup.

I’ve searched around in the tutorials DO has but can’t find anything that lays out how to do all this (which I assume is partly because I’m not using the right keywords when I’m searching coupled to my lack of knowledge to begin with).

I would really appreciate any help you could provide!

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1 Answer
larry July 27, 2014

I’m sure it’s possible to do what you want to do. However, 70 GB of storage (actually, 80 GB is the next available plan size) will cost you $80 per month. I’m pretty sure there is more cost effective storage around.

If I read the plan information correctly, you’re currently paying more than that for a VPS at Hostgator. You can get a DO VPS with similar specs for a quarter of the price and use a CDN like Rackspace Cloud Files (the first one I looked at) for storage and delivery of images. Offloading the delivery to a CDN, you probably wouldn’t need Cloudflare for anything but the static portions of your site, but you could probably still use them since Rackspace (and others, I’m sure) support CNAMEs for CDN URLs. I’m a relatively new Cloudflare user, so I don’t know right off hand how that would be set up.

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