I have recently started uploading my pictures to Flickr instead of uploading them to the web host for my blogs. It is mostly an experiment since I come nowhere near my bandwidth or disk space limits on even the best of months. So far, I have noticed a few pros and cons.
Pros of Hosting Photos On Flickr
- Backups - I’m not exactly spectacular about remember to back up parts of my sites. One of the main things I forget is the images. Flickr is much better at managing that stuff than I am, I’m sure.
- Networking - By hosting the pictures on Flickr, it has encouraged me to join a couple groups which, in addition to just being fun, is a great way for new people to eventually see my profile which links to my blog.
- Social Branding - Having a presence on Flickr is a good way to get your blog known by name. The more places people see that BeAGoodDad, the more they’ll just expect me to be there and the more they’ll relate all of that back to my parenting site.
- Performance - Flickr is optomize for delivering pictures over the interner. That’s what they do. I have a shared server hosting account so I’m somewhat at the mercy of how well the other sites on the server are doing. Since pictures are the largest bandwidth piece of a post, it makes some sense to offload that to a host that specializes in delivering those images. And if a post gets popular on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc., Flickr will be taking the bandwidth hit for the images instead of my server.
Cons of Hosting Photos On Flickr
- Downtime - If Flickr experiences some kind of downtime or performance lag, it will affect the loading speed of my posts or even the ability to see parts of the post at all. Flickr overall should have better uptime than my $20/month hosting plan but if everything is on one host, then you get all or nothing and not some strange situation where parts of a post don’t work properly.
- Future - I have no idea what Flickr will do in the future. They could close shop. They could change their terms. A better competitor could enter the martketplace. Any of those would mean that I would have to quickly get the posts up on either my own server or the new competitor and change all of the links that are pointing to Flickr pictures.
That last one, mixed with the fact that I never come anywhere near my bandwidth/disk space limits, means that I will probably use my own server. If my sites ever get popular enough to get some really big traffic bursts, I might reconsider. The good news for me is the experiment has made me start to get active with Flick so I can get a lot of the networking perks whether I embed the posts in my blog from Flickr or just keep another copy of the pictures there.
Personally, I would only suggest uploading to third party sites such as flickr and tinypic ONLY when you’re expecting major traffic on one of your posts. Say, one of your ‘wacky’ or ‘funny’ posts makes it to the Digg front page.. your blog would barely survive, even with all the bandwidth remaining (well, atleast.. that is what 75,000 unique visitors would do to a normal blog)