I'm definitely planning on using object storage. I mentioned S3 earlier. Ideally wouldn't wanna use AWS, but obviously a lot of other hosts have adopted the standard nowadays.

Like I said from the start I'm only planning to store images or maybe small short clips on the actual relay. Any videos would be on a separate server.

Yes I'd have another VPS dedicated to encoding videos, then it would fling them to object storage once they're ready and they get served from there so I only pay proportionally to how popular the content is.

And at this point I'm really just building something experimental for the fun of it. If I get to the point where my biggest problem is keeping up with the sheer volume of high demand for my service I'd be pretty happy to say the least! At that stage I'll have enough subscriptions coming in I can scale up, pay staff if needed.

Not even thinking that far ahead yet though this is just a hobby project to try building something new on new technology. If it happens to actually take off that's a bonus.