Serving Images with on-the-fly resize

Question

my company has recently started to get problems with the image handling for our websites.

We have several websites (adult entertainment) that display images like dvd cov

Answer 1

What you are looking for is best matched by Thumbor http://thumbor.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html , which is open source, backed by a huge company (means it will not disappear tomorrow), and ships with a lot of nice features like detecting what is important on an image when cropping.

For low-cost plus CDN I'd suggest to combine it with Cloudfront and AWS storage, or a comparable solution with a free CDN like Cloudflare. These might not be the best performing CDN providers, but at least still perform better than one server and also offload your image server on the cheap. Plus, it will save you a TON of bandwidth cost.