I'm looking for testimony, insights from those who have "been there, done that... " experience in storing media accessed by any web CMS on a separate machine "cloud instance" .
Use Case:
1) we want to migrate to the cloud 2) business team wants to cut costs 3) suggests to web team: "get this server at Digital Ocean and if you need more HD space, put current
/home/mydomain/public_html/media/
directory with 100GB of files that are not really accessed too frequently)Onto a remote cloud storage instance.
4) emails flying with instructions on how to mount a remote cloud bucket as a volume on the web server running the (now more light weight) CMS... throw in a few .htaccess mod_rewrite redirects and presto, it works.
Caveats:
1) we will have to refactor existing code (desktop clients) to fork file uploads that used to go to /media inside DOCROOT... and send those same uploads to the other machine, while writing the metadata about that media that the CMS uses... to the mySql dbase on the web server.
2) I wonder about the stability of such a frame work. How robust is such a mounted volume set up... will it just stay up 24/7 365 and I can sleep? or will attempts by our controllers, e.g. to listen to some audio:
http://www.thisDomain.com/view/someAudioFile.mp3
which is from the CMS point of view stored in /home/thisdomain/public_html/media/audio/songs/someAudioFile.mp3
where the latter is then served from the other box on the "big network" be vulnerable to failures, lags for the user.
3) Since I'm no pro I would have to hire someone for the set up and fix anything when it breaks.
vs: just get more HD space for the domains at Digital Ocean.
Any thoughts from any one who has or is doing this?