Media library on another server?

Question

I have been searching for a solution to have my media library on another server but i haven't figured out any good solution yet. I don't know if this is possible so let me know if i'm lost here :)

Anyway, our setup right now is pretty straight forward, we have a domain and a subdomain, both on a shared hosting. Due to performance issues, we are going to transfer our site to a VPS, but to make the transfer a little easier, we would like to keep the media on the "old server" Is this possible?

In my "wp-options.php" it looks like this now:

Upload path: ../../media.domain.com/public_html/uploads/
Upload URL path: https://media.domain.com/uploads

How do i write the path if the site and the media is on two different servers? Of course we could always set up another site on the new VPS and point the subdomain to that but it would be easier if we could keep the media on the current location.

Anyone done something similar maybe that could point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would suggest that you use a CDN to host your image files.

For starters you could move the images over to the new hosting though. Or is it many terrabytes of images? If so, I don't think it's a good idea to have them in Wordpress.

Regarding hosting the image library, have you considered using a CDN?

There are a bunch of plugins that would help you with this, they are all pretty straight forward:

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-s3-and-cloudfront/
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/aws-cdn-by-wpadmin/
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/cdn-enabler/

Personally, I've ended up using WP Rocket: https://wp-rocket.me/ It's working really well, and there are a lot of settings to tweak performance.

I'm using S3 + Cloudfront from Amazon on some projects. My favourite one so far though, has been StackPath: https://www.stackpath.com/, it's running really nice with WP Rocket.

But before you enable any CDN, I'd actually move over the images to the new VPS. I assume that you will be keeping the whole website, all posts etc.

• Dump the DB on the old site
• Copy the files from the old to the new using rsync, directly from the old server to the new.
• Import the DB dump on the new server.

Answer 2

You should think about setting up an Amazon S3 or something like that. You can scale if things get bigger, and only pay for a smaller bucket to start out. It's pretty easy to set up.