Well, I'm sure some people have found this problem somewhere down the line.

If you have ever tried to run a serious image hosting, or file hosting site you will most likely run out of storage space very quickly. And yes, now with the Amazon S3 and stuff like that you can just get an storage account and you will be set for life, but if you're like me and you like having your storage on your own servers then this mini post may be useful.

The best way I personally have found to deal with this problem is to use an HTTP-based distributed storage engine. By HTTP-based I mean using an web API written in any server-side language such as PHP or whatever else you like.

A regular distributed storage engine basically consists of a primary server and several "storage nodes". The primary server (or master node) keeps track of resource usage and available free space of other nodes among other things.

So by setting up a simple database and a consistent API written in either some quickie language like PHP or highly more robust like a dedicated C socket server things can get pretty awesome.

I hope to hear some comments, maybe I'll expand the post a bit!
ciachn Reviewed by ciachn on . When Storage Capacity is a Problem Well, I'm sure some people have found this problem somewhere down the line. If you have ever tried to run a serious image hosting, or file hosting site you will most likely run out of storage space very quickly. And yes, now with the Amazon S3 and stuff like that you can just get an storage account and you will be set for life, but if you're like me and you like having your storage on your own servers then this mini post may be useful. The best way I personally have found to deal with Rating: 5