AWS S3 is really the most cost-effective option.
I did a quick
price check:
First 50 TB / Month: $0.023 per GB
AWS is very reliable, but quite expensive on bandwidth. 10 TB doesn't sound unrealistic, and would cost $230 per month.
Contabo (I think TryNinja still uses this) gets you 32 TB bandwidth for €17.49 per month. And unlike AWS, that includes the rest of the server too. But it probably won't reach the same very high uptime AWS has.
You are right, I completely ignored that they make money from bandwidth. Btw, how big can be the demand on bandwidth in our case? I mean, this image hosting is dedicated for this forum, one will rarely use it outside of bitalk, so, not every uploaded image will waste bandwidth.
Btw what about Hetzner? It's in Europe (Germany or Finland) and is pretty cheap. I can't swear but I'm sure it's one of the cheapest option out there, it's not as cheap as Contabo but performs way better. Probably what makes AWS more attractive for joker_josue is probably the pay-as-you approach payment model.
No, it is not very economical, because bandwidth is very expensive.
In this type of service, the focus is not so much on disk space, but on bandwidth.
If it's not a secret, I'll ask this question again:
How is the demand on your service? Is it increasing? Or stabilizing? Or decreasing since imgur links aren't broken anymore?If the image proxy keeps served images cached for a period of time, bandwidth probably won’t be an issue. But if the image proxy queries the storage bucket every time someone accesses the image, egress charges will quickly add up. For example, an attacker/troll could potentially add the same image to a single post 1000 times, and subsequently access the post 1000 times — this would result in the same image being accessed a million times.