Web Hosting for Photographers

Where photography sites actually break

The failure is specific and it always happens at the worst moment. A season of client work goes up at full resolution, one folder at a time, because that is the easy way to do it. The plan fills. The next upload fails partway through, on a Sunday night, with a delivery due Monday. And the backup that would have made this a nuisance rather than a crisis was never actually running, because it was set up once, two hosts ago.

None of that is a hosting fault. It is what happens when the site is asked to do a job it was never the right tool for. Splitting that job into two pieces solves nearly all of it, and neither piece costs much.

The two jobs, kept apart

• The portfolio. Fifty to two hundred images you chose carefully, sized for a screen, that need to look sharp and load fast. This belongs on your own hosting.
• Client delivery. Hundreds or thousands of full-resolution files per job, each set relevant to one family for a few weeks. This belongs on a service built for it.

Put the second job on your hosting plan and you will spend the rest of the year managing storage instead of shooting. Keep them apart and your website goes back to being a small, ordinary site that never causes trouble.

Images that stay sharp without being enormous

Photographers resist this part, and the resistance is reasonable. You are being told to make your work smaller by people who cannot see what you can see. So it is worth being precise about what you actually give up, which is close to nothing.

An image exported at a width suited to a large screen, in a modern format, at a sensible quality setting, is visually identical to the enormous version on the device it will be viewed on. The difference only appears if somebody zooms in past the size you ever intended them to see, which is not a use case you should be designing for. Meanwhile the small version arrives before the visitor has decided to leave.

The parts worth getting right

• Export at the size the page displays, roughly. A hero that renders at 1600 pixels wide does not need a 6000 pixel file behind it.
• Use a modern format where you can. The saving over an old JPEG is substantial at the same visible quality.
• Let the page serve a smaller file to phones. Any competent site build does this, and it is where the biggest saving lives.
• Do not let the software upscale anything. It never improves an image and it always costs weight.
• Watermark if you want to, but know that it is a deterrent and not protection. Anybody determined can screenshot.

There is a fair objection here about print buyers and pixel peepers. If somebody is genuinely evaluating your sharpness before booking, they are doing it on a handful of images, not the whole portfolio. Serve those few at higher quality and leave the rest sensible.

Backups, because the archive is the business

A restaurant that loses its website loses a menu it can retype in an afternoon. You would lose the thing people paid you for. That difference is worth taking seriously, and it does not stop at the website.

Three separate things need protecting and they need different answers. The website itself, which is pages and a portfolio. Your delivery galleries, which are usually the service provider's problem rather than yours. And your working archive on the drives in your studio, which is entirely yours and is the one that ends careers when it goes.

1. Know what your host actually keeps

   Find out whether backups run, how far back they go, and whether restoring one is something you can do or something you have to ask for. Providers differ and the answer changes by plan. The general shape of it is on the website backups page.

2. Keep your own copy of the site as well

   A copy held only by your host is a copy that shares the fate of your host. Download the site files and, if it runs on a database, an export of that too. Once a quarter is enough for a portfolio that changes slowly.

3. Treat the studio archive separately

   Working drives, an on-site copy, and a copy that is not in the building. That third one is the one people skip, and it is the one that survives a flood or a theft. This is not a hosting product, it is a habit.

4. Test a restore before you need one

   Restore one file, or one gallery, on an ordinary afternoon. A backup nobody has ever restored from is a belief, not a backup. This is the step that gets skipped and it is the only one that proves the rest worked.

If you inherited the site from a previous designer and do not know what is running or where the files are, that is a solvable problem and a common one. The taking over a website page covers how to get control back before you need it in a hurry.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and photography sites arrive with the same two problems often enough that we recognise them from the description. Too many full-size files, and a backup nobody has tested. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and if the plan you are already on is the right one we will say so rather than sell you a bigger one.

If you are moving from an old host or an old designer, the order of operations that keeps your email working through the change is on the website migration page. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your site runs on.