Wayne Stallwood wrote:
It might be worth looking at one of the CMS systems (Joomla/Mambo or others) with one of the photo library plugins or one of the dedicated PHP photo libraries (which may be a better choice if you never need the other CMS functions)
We do have some experience with "gallery" (http://gallery.menalto.com) and using that had crossed my mind. Limiting the site rip simply by making it too cumbersome is always an option :-)
As for hosting I am a bit confused as to how he has sufficient space and bandwidth to put the images somewhere and yet not have capacity for the pages ?
I'm trying to get to the bottom of this too. It looks like he's found someone to host all the images (not worked out where yet; since the site is currently down I'm waiting on answers instead of working it out myself), and it is just the fact that the HTML is auto-generated from a database (and thus static content always looks "new") that is causing a massive bandwidth headache. If so, then this can almost certainly be massively simplified very easily. It would also mean that the 400MB+ of static HTML could become a few hundred kB of templates populated on the fly from the database, with suitable headers generated so that old content isn't seen as new. If this is all that's required I can do this myself (including hosting it).
However, if my understanding of the setup is correct, then the image hosting will be a problem because at some level all the main site is doing is giving out URLs to the images on the image host, which means he will lose control of those images completely. Unless he's pulling them through code on the local site (unlikely as I don't think there's any script code there), in which case his bandwidth requirements would be huge! So medium to long term I think he does need to get everything onto one host, which is where I will come unstuck as I can't realistically allocate 4GB of disk space, regardless of bandwidth requirements.
Incidentally, I've been directed towards http://www.coralcdn.org/ as an option for assisting on the bandwidth front, which is something I hadn't heard of until now. from the site: "Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem."