Currently, I run two websites and each site own it own big server. Currently, all of those two sites has roughly 300GB of images. Its grow rate is 15GB of images per month. I know that eventually, one big server cannot fit everything. So, I decided that I want to move all images to object storage. The only problem is that the data transfer price is too expensive. We served 10TB of data per month. It will cost us $1,200 for only data transfer using S3.
S3 + Cloudflare
Right now, I am using Cloudflare. From its report, it said that it saved us 7.5TB. So, if I use Cloudflare with S3, I can reduce the data transfer cost to $300.
S3 + 2 Web Server + Cloudflare
Or, I can roll 2 DigitalCloud server (costs $10 each, total $20). Then, write a simple PHP to retrieve the images from S3 then cache it for 4 days. Do a DNS load balance. Then, put it behind the Cloudflare.
The pros of this approach is that it is more flexible. I can do something like this http://s3.mywebsite.com/bucket/objectname.png?width=300&height=200. So instead of generate thumbnail and store it in S3. I can create thumbnail on fly. Then, let Cloudflare cache the thumbnail further. The cons is that I need to manage the servers.
So, the question is that which one is better option for me?
