The most common options for appear to be Amazon's S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files services. Although S3 is the most reliable service, it makes more sense for Skyo to use Rackspace since the site is already on their network.
-
The basic idea is to sign up for an account and create a container to hold the file assets. Once that is done you can upload the assets using an FTP client such as Cyberduck, although there are probably other options.
-
Reference assets using the container url, which will be something like
http://c186397.r00.cf1.rackcdn.com
. We can always put this into a YAML configuration file and reference it as something likeSettings.cdn_url
or something similar. Alernatively, we can optionally reference something likeimages.skyo.com
by setting up a CNAME, provided that someone who has access to theskyo.com
domain will add the CNAME... Ha!!!!! Seriously, it takes only a few seconds to setup a CNAME, so the hurdle here will be Follett. The upside is that this part is purely optional. -
The last part will be how we reference these assets from Rails. Here's a nice article of how a Rails dev did this with S3 and Cloud Files. It's not exactly what we need, but it's a good article with some useful suggestions. Also, Rackspace supports various headers which are a source of many problems for people on S3 or other services.