I believe there are pros and cons for both. Imgur is great because you truly don’t have to think about disk space or bandwidth. Imgur is not great because they can delete your posts at any time without warning and leave holes on the interenet, especially if we’re talking 5, 10 , 20 years from now.
Should I invest in a beefy server to store all of my photo needs without storage anixety? Or should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me? I think I’m already answering my own question by writing this post out, but I’d love to hear from the self hosting community.
I absolutely would not trust imgur… I wouldn’t trust anyone else with any of my data except as an encrypted offsite backup.
You do not need a beefy server either, you just need the storage space for it. And storage is relatively cheap. The only thing I would recommend is that if you are going to selfhost, that you realize you are responsible for your data; that means backups.
I’d think that a few terrabytes in a server would mean that you wouldn’t have to worry about image files for a while
There’s another option- cloud hosting in a cloud you control. You can also put a CDN infront of a not-so-beefy home server to avoid getting overwhelmed.
I was about to reply that not every user should be expected to self-host instances, but checked where I was before hitting send. A CDN to front images is a great option, but iirc the cache headers still aren’t sorted out properly, so be wary about fronting your whole Lemmy instance with a CDN.
