Images, Bandwidth, and Bottlenecks - A Kickstarter Tip

This is a Kickstarter tip that I wish someone would have shared with us prior to today.

We just released a very image-heavy project update that immediately went out to 3600 backers and was viewable by everyone on our project page. It took about 30 seconds for our dedicated web server to slow to a crawl and stop delivering images.

Luckily, we already use Amazon cloud services for other tasks in our office. So 10 minutes later, we had all images moved over from our server to Amazon's cloud and are now streaming them directly from someone else's bandwidth.

So my tip for today is to not use your own servers for image or video hosting. Signup with Amazon, Rackspace, even Flicker. And keep all of your photos on their servers linked onto your Kickstarter page.