I'm working on a personal blog that will be used for reviewing various goods/services and as a dev journal. I'm writing this in Angularjs and Nodejs as a learning experience, but I plan on using it for a long time as well.
I have a section like a newspaper column where authenticated users can write their own mini blog and can also upload their own images. I plan on limiting all images on the blogs to 4 files (max) at 1MB (max) each.
I've seen a lot of angular file upload plugins, which is nice, but my primary concern is whether I should serve the images through a cdn now or to just store everything (the site, database, images, etc) on a single VPS instance. Digital Ocean gives 2 TB transfer (incoming + outgoing combined), and disk storage is pretty cheap.
I guess I'm not sure when to optimize bandwidth costs and server loads? If I do it now, there's an extra upfront cost in dev time and monetary costs, but in the long run things may be easier to manage. If instead I deploy everything on one instance and then migrate the site to a CDN when there's a consistent traffic increase, this may be cheaper upfront, but migrating the database may be a huge pain/testing nightmare? I don't expect much traffic. Maybe 100k-200k daily views at best after a few years(optimistically speaking).
