Magento - Storing all images on cdn not my hosting server

Question

I am new to magento and i have just starting setting up my first sites. One of the requirements i am after is to store all images files on a seperate server from which the site is hosted on. I have briefly looked into amazon cloudfront and the following plugin:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/cloudfront-cdn.html

This works alongside my cloudfront distribution setup so the images are being accessed from the cdn alongside the js,css etc when i check the source. My issue is they still reside on my own server too.

Is there a way to have everything just on a cdn so that my server disk space can be kept as low as possible with only the template files on there, no images?

Answer 1

Based on experience, I would really recommend you do not try completely removing any media files away from your actual server disk. The main role of CDN should just be to completely mirror these whenever files are new or updated and such.

However, if you really want to do this I would also sternly warn you that you do not attempt this with js and css files. The trouble is just not worth it. You'll see why later.

So we're left with media or mostly image files. These files are usually very large thus the reasoning behind moving it away from server disk.

My strategy and what I did before is I used an S3 bucket behind the Cloudfront CDN. I moved all stuff from the media directory to S3, Cloudfront configured to pull from S3, then Cloudfront CDN then is CNAME'd as media.mydomain.com. Obviously, I would then set my media base URLs (System > Configuration > General > Web) to http://media.mydomain.com/media/ and https://media.mydomain.com/media/.

It worked perfectly. No CORS issues at all because I did not touch CSS/JS base url paths. Because for those files, I just relied on the free Cloudflare CDN (yeah, yeah, I know).

Next thing I knew and saw defects with this setup is that all uploads do not work at all. WSIWYG uploads do not go to the S3 bucket immediately.. However, there was a solution using s3fuse though which then immediately degraded into a problem as it had bad memory leaks too.

What ultimately worked is we just paid for the additional disk space (we were using Amazon AWS), Wrapped the whole domain on Cloudflare CDN, and when we needed SSL we upgraded to Pro.

Simple, it works and it's head-ache free.

NB: I'm not connected with Cloudflare whatsoever, I'm just really really happy with their service.