Nino you mentioned that the site only displays 400x600, does it actually resize the photo and keep the original 2Mb version as well as the 400x600 version? Or does it simply display the 2Mb file at 400x600 on the fly?
What i'm getting at is can the 2Mb version be removed/relocated while retaining the 400x600 copy? Better still the 2Mb version could be archived out to some other hosting facility.
2MB is the maximum size allowed in the attachments sub folder. You cannot upload a file larger. Some files are 20Kb. The forum software does make slight format changes, but I don't know the process behind it. I know it does not store the original and then make a copy that is presented withing the posts. It simply keeps the original, regardless of the size or quality.
The current attachment directory cannot be archived because it is tied in with the database. If I view the file structure in Filezilla, I can view the first 10,000 files, but if I download them, they are junk. Admins can see the attachment names and their details. There's over 1900 pages of photos - 17,898 to be exact ! It is currently 13.5 Gig on disk. The attachment management system was set to restrict and manage the size of the attachment directory, but it simply did not work from "day 1". So it has grown to such a size that out host cannot backup using the standard backup process. This is a huge problem.
Regarding site Backups - Hostgator won't backup any site that is over 4 Gig in size. Admin have to manually download using FTP. So if the site crashed and we had to restore, we would lose a lot of threads and we would be down for a long time for the site restore.
Regarding the technology we want to use -
https://plugins.hostgator.com/codeguard/This effectively allows us to keep a backup of the site and also we can perform upgrades with the confidence of knowing we can "roll back" to a previous version if things fail. It also provides a backup that is managed by our host, instead of us.
The price for 10 Gig is US$100 per year
The price for 25 Gig is US$240 per year
That's a huge difference in price. The aim is to reduce our total space from 15 Gig (entire site that includes 13.5 Gig in attachments) to 7.5 Gig so we can allow for growth and pay US$100 for the 10 Gig Cloud Backup solution.
