[PuffinBlue]

Not really.

Cold storage is absolutely a necessity when you reach the scale of imgur, unless you want to run the service incredibly inefficiently.

imgur keeps photos forever [0]. To do so without some kind of cold storage infrastructure in place for all the millions of photos that will probably never be seen again, or perhaps at a rate of once per year, would be infrastructure cost suicide.

Facebook faces a similar challenge and has gone in to detail about how it developed a cold storage strategy to deal with it[1].

I would say that for a service like imgur there is probably a level of parity between the amount of importance they need to place on content delivery and on cold storage.

[0] https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/201476457-How-long-...

[1] https://code.facebook.com/posts/1433093613662262/-under-the-...

[steckerbrett]

That's weird, I've seen conflicting information that says imgur deletes images not accessed for 180 days.