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My Media Storage Infrastructure for 2026

· 3 min
s3 storage

I started the new year by getting kicked off Cloudinary’s free tier for image storage.

Deciding that I do not want to have to migrate ever again, I have architected a simple way to get off of SaaS/Cloud services and still maintain control of my media. I was not willing to pay $99 a month for a hosted image service (I never used their transformations etc.) - and while Cloudinary offers a generous free tier for storage, I got hit on the bandwith limitations (a good problem to have, I suppose!)

This will serve as a guide how I have setup the infrastructure, and how I migrated away from Cloudinary’s nice, albeit, walled garden.

The Migration off Cloudinary#

The Media#

I simply downloaded all media from Cloudinary and saved it locally on my machine, in directories for each site/project.

Files were not named well, so I took the hour or so of going through in emacs (dirvish/dired) and renaming files so as to have logical paths for my object storage. I then placed the media in directories for my projects, and was ready for the migration.

The file tree looks something like this:

.Media
├── project1
├── project2
├── joshblais
│   └── post
├── Mountainthebook
├── company
│   ├── project
│   ├── logos
│   ├── project
│   │   └── projectlisting
│   └── blog
└── project3

It was now cleaned and ready to be shipped to object storage.

S3 Compatible Object Storage#

Hetzner offers a pretty decent s3 compatible object storage, so I spun up an instance for this:

Create Credentials#

Upon creation of the bucket, you will be prompted to save your credentials - Copy these to your password store for reference later.

rclone.conf:

[hetzner]
type = s3
provider = Other
env_auth = false
access_key_id = YOUR_KEY
secret_access_key = YOUR_SECRET
endpoint = fsn1.your-objectstorage.com
acl = public-read

Copying media over to the Bucket#

I then rcloned the whole Media directory to an S3 compatible storage bucket, and when referencing urls, they are done like so:

~https://cdnlocation.net/joshblais/vimiumc2.png~

I created a script for this using a nix-shebang, defining rclone as a dependency, and now it’s portable to any system running nix, nice.

#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell -i bash -p rclone


set -euo pipefail


MEDIA_DIR="${1:-$HOME/Media}"
BUCKET="your-bucket-name"
REMOTE="hetzner"


rclone sync "$MEDIA_DIR" "$REMOTE:$BUCKET" \
  --progress \
  --checksum \
  --transfers 8

Renaming tags in projects#

The (not) fun part is migrating your tags in all your projects. In emacs, I wrote a quick lisp function to go through the projects to hunt down cloudinary references:

(defun jb/hunt-cloudinary ()
  "Interactively hunt and migrate cloudinary references."
  (interactive)
  (consult-ripgrep nil "cloudinary"))


(map! :leader
      (:prefix ("j" . "jump")
       :desc "Hunt cloudinary refs" "t" #'jb/hunt-cloudinary))

Replacing with the correct image and path. This took a few hours to do so, but in the future, should never happen again as I have all images named correctly (and continue to do so upon adding new ones) - if I need to migrate storage hosts, I will just change the cdn name in a project wide find-replace.

Bunny CDN for caching images globally#

One thing I lost with Cloudinary is the ability to have a global CDN caching my images. This was easily impletmented with BunnyCDN - I created a pull zone, pointed it to my hetzner storage bucket, and it just works.

Cost#

So, while Cloudinary wanted to charge me $99 a month, this setup costs ~€5/month. I don’t get the image transformations baked in, but I am likely going to add either some pre-processing in the upload pipeline or at runtime via imgproxy.

Overall, I am very happy with the setup, it is completely web-GUI free, fast, and quite robust if there is ever a migration needed in the future. The 1TB plan with Hetzner is very reasonable and gives ton of overhead for years to come.

As always, God bless, and until next time.

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