Cloud hosting and attachemnts

[vgelatin]

My community is currently running on a self hosted vBulletin 4.2. We allow uploads of pictures (mostly motorcycles and vacation type snaps) and we are using the configuration option to store the uploads as files in the files system rather than blobs in the database. I don't care much how the pictures are stored once we move to the cloud, I just want to know if this is going to cause a problem migrating to your cloud solution? It would cause a real ruckus if we lost all our old photos in a move.

Assumed in this question is the assumption photo uploads (not just linking, actual uploading to the forum. Link rot can be a real problem for us) are allowed in your cloud hosted solution? What are the limits on that?

Additionally, one of the major complaints I get from our users is about photos being posted from phones displaying in sideways or upside down, depending on the orientation the phone was in when the picture was taken. Our setup currently doesn't do any sort of auto-roataion based on meta-data, or even allow users to manually rotate them after upload. Teaching some of these people how to rotate it before uploading is ... well not worth the effort to try. I'm not sure if the root of this problem is the vBulleting software or our installation of imagemagick (or some combination of the two), and I'm not looking for help solving that. I'm just interested if this is a problem that would be resolved by migrating to your cloud hosted solution?

Thanks in advance!

[Wayne Luke]

It doesn't cause a problem. We just need a backup of your attachments directory and its contents during the migration.

Uploading photos is allowed on Cloud. User uploads is recommended over using the [img] tag to insert images. You never know when a third-party image site will break or prevent linking in the future.

vBulletin 5 attempts to take the orientation data into account during uploads so the image will be rotated if the data is present.

[vgelatin]

That all sounds good so far.

Uploading photos is allowed on Cloud. User uploads is recommended over using the [img] tag to insert images. You never know when a third-party image site will break or prevent linking in the future.

The plans seems to be tiered exclusively on bandwidth usage, is there any disk space limit? What are the maximum individual upload limits, and does it do any sort of auto-resizing if someone try's to upload a pic that's too big?

[Wayne Luke]

All packages come with 100 GB of storage space. This site (vbulletin.com) only uses 10 GB of storage space. So you have some room to grow. If necessary, custom storage packages can be negotiated.

The system allows for up to 15 Megabytes per file.The system allows users to upload images up to 4608 pixels by 4608 pixels. These settings cannot be adjusted on the Cloud servers.

The default image display size is configured as 1440 pixels by 900 pixels with a byte size of 900,000 bytes. These can be adjusted. The system will attempt to resize them down to the limitations specified in the software's control panel.

[vgelatin]

Wayne, I really appreciate your timely and useful responses. I really think we're going to move to your cloud. I just have a couple more questions.

1. Can we add our own custom smilies in the cloud forums? Ditto themes.
2. I notice this forum makes calls to both google analytics and facebook, do the could hosted forums do that too by default? (if so, can that be disabled?)
3. If we want to move hosts again, how easily can we get a copy of our data out of your cloud?

I think those are the final questions we have before pulling the trigger.

[Wayne Luke]

1. You can import custom smilies. You can import custom themes that do not edit the default templates.
2. Connections to Google and Facebook are both optional and not configured by default.
3. You can request a backup of your database at any time.