Hobby | Website price

[Uncle_Frank 0]

I was wanting to start a website for posters, backdrops, logos etc for personal use maybe public depending on price. What I really would like is a way to grab image data for Emby from a website and reason started me wanting this is I like my data showing as thumb just like Hulu. How much would it cost to build a website just for images per month even a guess on price is what I'm looking for please. TY

[Luke 42950]

@vdatanetmay have some tips.

[vdatanet 1661]

If I'm reading this right, the end goal is the Hulu-style landscape tiles rather than the website itself — so it might be worth separating the two.

For the look: Emby already supports that. Set the library display to "Thumb" and it will use landscape art. The gaps you're seeing are just items missing a Thumb image. Two things usually fix most of it:

- Enable Fanart.tv and move it to the top of the Image Fetchers order for that library. It serves moviethumb/tvthumb, which is exactly the image type you want.
- For anything still missing, drop a thumb.jpg (or landscape.jpg) in the item's folder. Local images take priority over anything fetched remotely, they survive reinstalls, and they cost nothing.

If you want a consistent style across the whole library — same framing, logo overlaid, same treatment — no provider will give you that, since Fanart is user-submitted and all over the place. But that's a job for a script that generates the images and writes them into your folders, not for a website.

On the website question: hosting images is genuinely cheap. Static object storage (Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Bunny) runs roughly $1-5/month for a personal-sized set, and R2 has no egress charges plus a 10 GB free tier. Add a domain at ~$12/year. So call it under $5/month if that's all it is.

The expensive part isn't the hosting. Emby won't pull from an arbitrary URL on its own — you'd need a C# plugin implementing a remote image provider, and then keep it working across Emby releases. That's real ongoing work for something local files already solve.

Two questions that would change my answer: where are the images coming from (making them yourself, or collecting from existing providers?), and is this just for your own server or for other people to use?

[Uncle_Frank 0]

Thank you for all that but I was just asking how much a website would cost monthly to host pics. Emby has a hard time with posters like this

[Uncle_Frank 0]

I hit enter by mistake 

[vdatanet 1661]

Fair enough — short answer: for just hosting images, under $5 a month. Often $0.

Object storage is what you want here (Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, or Bunny). Rough numbers:

- Under 10 GB: free on R2's free tier
- ~20 GB (roughly 50k images): about $0.30/month
- ~100 GB: about $1.50/month

R2 doesn't charge for bandwidth at all, which matters if you ever open it up — that's the line item that turns a $2 bill into a $200 one on AWS. Add a domain at ~$12/year if you want a nice URL.

If you'd rather have an actual site with a browse/search page and uploads instead of just files on a URL, a small VPS (Hetzner, Contabo) is $5-15/month all in.

Separately — you mentioned Emby has a hard time with posters like this. If custom art keeps getting replaced when the library refreshes, that's a different problem to hosting: lock the image on the item (or turn off the image fetchers for that library) and it'll stick. Happy to help with that one if it's what you're hitting.

[Uncle_Frank 0]

Thank you, that's what I was looking for and yes I know lock the img all that I know bro. Think I will start a website just for images for Emby you get my drift what I'm saying. If you want to help me with the website I would appreciate it thank you. Next week I will get a $100 gift card and buy a wix account I guess and just go by day I guess. After I get it setup I can give you login it's not a big deal so yeah if you would like to help thanks.

[vdatanet 1661]

Glad that pointed you somewhere useful.

I'm going to pass on working on the site itself, though — I stick to helping out in the threads here, and I don't take logins to anyone's accounts. Nothing personal at all. If you post questions in the forum as you go I'll chime in where I can, and that way other people get the benefit too.

One thing I'd flag before you spend the gift card: Wix is the wrong tool for this. It's a page builder for brochure sites, not an asset host. No S3-style API, storage and bandwidth caps, and no sane way to serve thousands of image files to a media server. You'd hit the wall fast and the money's gone.

If you do want to spend on hosting, put it into object storage instead — Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2 or Bunny. That's the same thing Fanart.tv and TMDB are doing under the hood, it's a few dollars a month, and a $100 card would last you years.

But honestly, give Posterizarr a week first. It solves the actual problem you showed in that screenshot, on your own library, for free. If you still want a site after that, at least you'll know exactly what you need it to do — and you'll have spent nothing to find out.

Good luck with it either way, and post back how it goes.

[Uncle_Frank 0]

Thank you for the detailed info, like hearing other thoughts always smart people with better ideas and knowledge is what I like. Yes I am going to make a site for pictures and yes it's not something I done before so yes I will be asking Q's lol. I just want a picture site for Emby clients what I really want is people to be able to upload to the site under categories like poster, backdrop, logo, thumb. That should be good I think.