Do you host your images/Database on a separate server?

Hey everyone!

I'm in a little bit of a dilemma thinking about what to do to handle a significant increase of traffic on a website. I will be running paid ads for that site with relatively significant budgets (compared to what my shared hosting account with HostGator could handle at least). The site is a simple wordpress blog, but it has lots of images.

The main issue is with bandwidth.

I've thought of a couple of alternatives:

1) Move all images (since they're the ones consuming most bandwidth) to Amazon S3 or a separate image host, and hotlink/load them from there.

Problem with this approach is that it's a little inconvenient. It's just a lot simpler to keep everything inside wordpress.

2) Move the whole website to a VPS/dedicated with good bandwidth.

So basically keep everything in one big place or distribute?

If you also have other ideas, please share. Appreciate your opinions!

You could use cloudflare as one option. It most often reduce the bandwith usage of your hosting plan.

Hotlink is indeed a good option. Since you have inconvenience in it, better you can switch over your account to dedicated server or vps so that you can have better bandwidth to handle your traffic.

Cloudfare is pretty good, loads the response time of the pages as well.

I'm using cloudfare . It's really very good . You should use it.

Moving database wouldn't help much with the bandwidth usage and it generally fits high traffic websites on a server facing overloads. On a shared web hosting account it doesn't make sense.
Cloudfare CDN, or moving your images away are indeed a good solution to reduce your bandwidth usage.

Also, you could consider enabling Gzip compression if not done already or even make sure that your images are saved in an optimal format for web hosting (Photoshop does wonder on this matter with the save for the web option in PNG) but there are of course many free alternative to achieve the same purpose.

Thanks for the input everyone! Will try out CloudFlare and see how it goes. Thanks!