What is an image hosting service? How should I choose an image hosting service when building my own website?

What is an Image Hosting Service? Beginners building websites might hear experienced webmasters mention using an image hosting service to store images. New webmasters may not understand what an image hosting service is or when it should be used. So, Naibabiji is here to provide some basic knowledge about image hosting services.

What is an Image Hosting Service?

FromBaidu Baike's explanation of image hosting：

Image hosting generally refers to servers that store images, which can be domestic or international. International image hosting often suffers from slow access speeds due to factors like geographical distance, affecting image display speed. Domestic options are also divided into single-line hosting, multi-line hosting, and CDN-accelerated hosting. Image hosting is specifically designed to store images and allows you to link images externally. Many image hosting services are free.

From Baidu Baike's explanation of image hosting, you should now understand what image hosting means. So you might wonder, since I already have my own server, why would I need to use image hosting? Keep reading to find out.

Why do you need an Image Hosting Service?

Typically, the reasons we use image hosting when building websites or during daily internet use are the following situations:

1. Temporarily sharing images as external links on other websites;
2. Your own server's hard drive is insufficient;
3. Your own server has low bandwidth and slow internet speed;
4. You don't want to store images on your own server;
5. You don't have a server but still want to share images.

Image hosting refers to servers specifically used to store images, and more commonly refers to services that provide external image linking. There are free image hosting services as well as paid ones. Some websites even allow you to upload images without restricting external link usage; these websites can be used as image hosting (utilizing others' bandwidth and servers).

Do you need an Image Hosting Service for building your own website?

Based on Naibabiji's years of website building experience, it is not recommended to use image hosting to manage images when building your own website, at least don't expect to use free image hosting to store images. Free is often the most expensive. When your website has been operating for years and suddenly one day the image hosting service fails, all your images will be lost. Can you accept that kind of loss?If you don't use image hosting but your internet speed is slow, what should you do?You might say, I bought a domestic server with a small pipe (meaning the server has low bandwidth, e.g., only 1M). If I put too many images, even opening the site myself is slow; without image hosting, it's too slow. So how to solve this situation without using image hosting? We can utilize cloud storage or CDN services, such as the previously sharedYoupaiyun CDN tutorial for website acceleration. CDN and cloud storage actually also use third-party server hard drives and bandwidth, but you keep a copy of the original images on your own server, so even if the third-party service fails, you don't have to worry about losing image data.

What are some free Image Hosting Services?

With a simple search using a search engine, you can find many image hosting services. For example, imgchr and sm.ms in the image above are two well-known image hosting services. As long as you explore, you don't have to worry about not having image hosting to use. What you need to worry about is how to restore the images on your website if one day the image hosting suddenly becomes unavailable.

Summary

Using image hosting services can save your website's server hard drive usage and bandwidth usage. Good image hosting can speed up your website's access. When using image hosting, you must consider (especially with free image hosting) the stability and security of the image hosting, and whether there might be a sudden unavailability one day. At that time, can you quickly restore the images used in your website's posts and pages? If not, it is not recommended to use image hosting services. You can consider using free CDN or cloud storage services (actually, paid ones are not expensive; don't believe in permanent free services).