Hello DPers. I am recently looking to start an image hosting site but I have no experience with this kind of sites before and I am looking for advices of others, especially those that have owned ones before. I am looking for those info... What domain should I choose? Short and unrememberable (like imghstz) or longer but brandable and rememberable (like MyHotPictures or something like that)? What kind of hosting and where exatly should I buy? Bare in mind that assume that I have budget close to zero and I can not afford to buy dedicated servers. I am not thinking to start a site popular as Imageshack.us, so I think something cheaper and reliable would do it. Any experience or receommendations? How should I monetize? I am banned by AdSense, will AdBrite earn good too? Should I promote affiliate products like ringtones or competetive image hosting sites with affiliate banners? What kind of script should I choose? I can not afford to hire a coder, so I am looking for a free script with good amount of features but not loaded with a lot useles stuff, something simple with just an upload form on the front page would do. And no registration required for users if possible. How should I promote? Should I post in forums or I should rely more on social bookmarking of interesting content (Images) in the site? Or maybe some site SEO, but I think it will be hard because of the big competition for image hosting sites and keywords. Thanks in advance to all. I will give a rep if I like your reply.
Well, we're kind of in the same boat pretty much. If you would like to be partners in image hosting marketing (creating and selling image hosting sites), that would be cool. If not, no worries, lol. But the image hosting script that I use for the site I just put up is Mihalism Multi Host. It allows users to upload an unlimited amount of images, they can register, and theres even a gallery/user gallery feature on the script. It's super easy to install, its free, and has an easy to use admin panel. Another feature I forgot to mention is the random image feature. That's pretty basic, and not very amazing, but it's still one of the features, haha.
What hosting are you using (be specific please, give names and prices, on PM if you want)? How long have you been running your site? Have you had any troubles. I think you are just as new as I am in the field, but thank you for the script. I think I will stop on it too. Rep applied... Others? What do you say?
I am using HostGator's $9.99 hosting. I get 600,000MB of space and 600GB of bandwidth. It's perfect. PS: If you decide to get HostGator hosting, use the coupon NEWYEAR and you'll get a 20% off discount, but you'd have to get the hosting today because the coupon expires tomorrow!
Well, I do plan to host multiple sites on the server. I have about 5 addon domains on it at the moment, but none of the sites are fully developed yet.
I have actually started a image hosting site today - ImagePik. Please examine it's speed (HostGator), domain name and ease of use? Any tips for promoting it?
Promoting your site can be done this way: Make a video of how to upload a picture to your site and post it on you tube (dont forget to give the url in the description) Startup a blog about photography or something similar. Write a few articles about image hosting and / or photography and submit them to article directories. All of these methods require work but you will get results from them in time.
You can get by ok with shared hosting for an image hosting site? i thought nothing less than dedicated was needed, then again am i thinking of file hosting, as in bigger files.
Forum signatures seem to (from my experience) a good way to promote image hosting site as alot of forum users quite reguarly post images and need somewhere to upload them
My 2 cents: File sizes: Small file sizes work better than large size image hosts at times if your not going for a photography or porn niche. Large file hosts always got me more porn then anything to delete all day long.(just my opinion) I go for the small file 50-200kb type on my few image hosting sites. But my niche is auction/avatars/smiley/game image types Serverwise: Start off with shared and grow it, if you need more memory or if your shared is holding back the amount of requests allowed at the same time... You need a VPS because you will get hit with tons of requests with even a semi popular site. After the vps memory drags too much and you tweaked it every way you can.. move to Dedicated. But you dont have to start with anything big till it grows. Fun part: Monitor everything before you get hit with Email spammers abusing you with images, and porn freaks. More porn.. you become popular.. but they wont click your ads unless your targeting them. End of the day: The pics you monitor will either put a smile on your face as you family pics, make you laugh at some of the crazy things people upload to post on myspace or whatever, make you cry in horror sometimes.., or get you way too intimate with your users as they upload pics of their new wart to email a doctor or who knows who.. Anyway Good Luck! It can be a pretty funny business most of the time