Its a great idea, and one that I have wanted to do for years. To be more exact, I wish to make it easier for people to upload these photos to our own systems to manage. Its too easy to link the photos elsewhere and in the process you have issues of the free use agreement you give up rights to the photo/s and or free services get limitations to outside linking when daily bandwidth limitations are reached for daily or monthly cycles.
I have a large drive array in my possession that is to be used for the SVXWN. Its came without drives, but I have used money from donations and badges to purchase some 2TB drives along with the expensive external SAS cables. The site runs on the blade chassis and has no way to connect directly to the SAS array, so yet another server would need to be added as a middleman to present the drive space of the array to the blade chassis via iSCSI or NFS, or migrate off the blade chassis to a single server with external SAS RAID card/s. The biggest hold up on this upgrade at this very time is some logistical issues I do not wish to fully address at this time. In short, we don't pay for the power, bandwidth, space we consume, or cooling as more or less a lien on my paycheck and benefits. For now, this means situation normal. But there is a very good chance that I might have to shake things up A BUNCH, and if I need to move the servers, we will have to go into a situation where we will have to pay for retail services. Some of the metered costs of this are bandwidth, power consumption, and how much space the servers take up. For scale sake, if we paid for just the power and space alone as a retail customer, this photo below of the SVX servers and equipment would be $500 a month.
We run on older, cheaper, equipment, that just happens to be larger by size. We can shrink everything down to a single server that has multiple 2.5" SAS drives, lots of memory and would only cost about $50-80 a month in space, but this technology is going to cost us thousands up front. Like how a jack leverages heavy load with increased work (pumping of the handle) right now we leverage large space usage for cheaper one time costs of used older gear. If we have to move and pay for services, we will have to trade this equation for higher single time costs, and less monthly fees.
Hope all whom care understand.
