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.
You are talking about your own photos or photos you wanna share with others? If it is the former, with all due respect but I have to say it is insane to put them all to imgur. Heck even uploading them all to Google Cloud is a lot more reasonable… If it is the latter, it is fine as long as you are not expecting the images to live forever.
should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me?
No, unless you have a paid contract with them that specifies heavy liability if they decide to screw you
