Simon Willison’s Weblog

For a Django application, deployed on Heroku, what are my options for storing user-uploaded media files?

21st October 2013

My answer to For a Django application, deployed on Heroku, what are my options for storing user-uploaded media files? on Quora

S3 is really a no-brainer for this, it’s extremely inexpensive, very easy to integrate with and unbelievably reliable. It’s so cheap that it will be practically free for testing purposes (expect to spend pennies a month on it).

You could store uploaded files in the Heroku database, but that will explode the size of your backups and will be much more expensive than paying for S3.