Hi all,

I'm in the process of developing a site with image upload functionality. Obviously in these early days I don't expect anything too taxing with a small number of users, but going forward - how do the big boys really handle all of this?

I know a lot of these images served by Facebook etc. are on sub-domains, but surely these masses of data must take up an enormous amount of hard disk space as well as making sure they are in multiple locations. Is it likely there is a central database that holds a reference between a picture id and a list of servers it resides on?

How would this work?

Any thoughts by anyone would be greatly appreciated.