how much storage do you use...

Been a while since I've had a live Dolphin site on the go, but have a couple in 'slow production' when i get free time to work on them!

But, I was just thinking about storage and how much in reality a busy Dolphin site could end up using...

for example, if you have a relatively small site with 1000 active members, and each day (on ave) each member uploads the equivalent of just 1mb of data (photo, blog, article, wall post, vid) then thats 1GB a day in file storage...

Over 1 year, over 350GB on your server. 

If your server is set to do a general backup of whole site, then your looking at not far short of 1TB per year just based on the above figures which would be a smallish site...

Previous sites I've built have had thousands of active members, however, these were mainly using the admin for posting content. 

New plans I have are for a user driven site but what if it 'works' and you get 10k active users, or even 'better' 100k...

Thats a shed load of server space needed just for storage, aside of looking at a decent server to run the db.

How do you get round this? Or is this just one of the prices to pay for success...

uhhh viptopia has over 20 thousand and it zips to 9.3 gigs  

I guess its all getting compressed then on upload.

 That's all? I have 49.7 gigs now.

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5       907G  225G  637G  27% /
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb1       917G  548M  870G   1% /backup
/dev/sda1       243M   86M  145M  38% /boot
/dev/sda3       2.0G   70M  1.9G   4% /tmp

If you have a lot of people uploading videos, they are going to take a lot of space.  Embedded videos are only going to take the space of the thumbnail.  Photos can take a lot of space if people are uploading 16 to 20 megapixels images; you can have it where you don't store the original image by hacking the code.  It all depends on your site and how your members use it.  Some sites will see a lot of storage use and other sites will not even if they have a lot of members and are very busy.  MP3 is another area, typical song file can be around 5 megs; depends on the rate at which it was coded.  You can limit the sizes of upload but if you restrict too much, then you risk losing members if they can not upload their content.

You have controls to help also.  If you want to allow embedding of videos from other sites but not uploaded videos, then you can turn off the uploaders and just leave the embedd.  However, I have not found a lot of people uploading their own videos to my site; we offer that and one of the things we offer is that our videos can be streamed without those stupid Google adverts slapped on them.

I've seen some active dolphin sites with terabytes of data and had to move a few of them...  

It just all depends on what direction you go with the site.  Music, videos, Photos or all the above..

yeah you have to remember I encourage youtube embedding for videos... I did away with video record, and for months I trimmed things and options on purpose from getting the site to where it got too bloated too quick

on the flip side of the coin is rangerschat with 3500 members at 16 gigs LOLLL

I don't envourage embedding at all. Nothing worse than having a video disappear because someone removed it from YouTube.

The idea that space is a problem anymore is antiquated at best. Drive space costs almost nothing now and it's a simple task to set up storage for as many terabytes as you need. The ONLY time allowing people to upload a lot of videos becomes a problem is with the bandwidth consumption. There are towns now where I live that offer terabyte internet connection speeds now so even that is slowly becoming a non issue.... (Longmont is considering a 1000 GB Fiber Internet connection you can package onto your electric bill).

i have to agree , you get members that do upload and members that barely upload at all. the ones that do are actually adding value to your site. Who wants to visit a website full of nothing . NOT ME.

BTW @ SkyForum i have visited the towing site. nice niche website

Thanks. It's definitely a niche. Been building it in one form or another for almost ten years now. I've got a lot blocked to standard members or guests. If your really interested, I can upgrade your membership. The forums are pretty well developed as well as the photos and the videos, most of which can't be accessed by guests.

 If I was an asshole I would not share this tip, but I am not, so I am gonna.

Embedding videos via youtube helps your site tremedously over them uploading and here is why, most users dont add all the tags and keywords with the videos they upload right.. Something about how yahoo tags and keywords theirs when you do an embed of a video, and it pulls the tags, description, and stuff from the video you are embedding it gives you a very high rank for the keywords attached to it... wont say much more but I will say, Embedding videos from Youtube is far better for your site in Google searches then adding them and Uploading your own.

LOL! Until they are removed or taken down from Youtube for some idiotic violation.... Then you are left with a blank hole where the video used to be. As each video gets older, it's more prone to disappear. If you are into saving all the info posted on your site for future use by your members, embedding video creates a huge gap in your older content. I have posts on my site that are more than 10 years old and I guarantee of they were embedded, most of that content will have disappeared.

Having said all that, I need to qualify it. Useless posting by members of videos they just happened across they found funny or some other useless information really doesn't fit this model. On my site, the content is very specific and remains relevant for a very long time.... Dating sites or other sites where the creator is just trying to get massive content for advert dollars etc aren't really affected by this and should allow embedding...

And just to be clear, I do allow embedding but always recommend my user posts his content directly.