Hello
I have two feedbacks that I think I need to share with you @CS-Cart_team
One of the biggest problems we have on our site and I think even medium to large sites have; is the large size of the Images folder. Our site’s photos have filled up more than 400GB of storage space!
This has made daily backups difficult, costly, and time-consuming. While if there was an FTP upload option for images upload, the backups would be separated and the main server backup would be smaller and faster in critical situations. Also, using a separate server to upload images would significantly reduce the processing load of the main server and save costs and other benefits. Also, upload servers are much more affordable. I would be happy if you have a solution, please provide it.
I have been wanting to use CDN services for years, but the big problem I always had was the presence of the “Admin Panel” in the main path. When the “cloud” is activated on the site, the site’s administration section has problems and causes disruption in the “administration panel” function, uploads are slow, saves are delayed and interrupted, and only by turning off the “cloud” or placing this panel on a subdomain! The problem is solved.
Of course, solutions have been proposed by these service providers, but none of them have solved this problem. If the “administration panel” has the ability to be separated and placed on a subdomain (e.g panel.mysite.com), it would be great, and if you have a solution, I would be happy to share it.
400 GB for images is a lot. Is that mostly original images, or do thumbnails take a significant portion of that space?
Normally, when an original image is deleted, its thumbnails should be removed as well. If they aren’t, there could be several reasons: interrupted cleanup due to server timeouts, file permission issues, or even third-party add-ons.
Another thing to check is whether you have lots of obsolete thumbnails. For example, if your storefront used 32×32 thumbnails in the past but now uses 128×90, the old ones may still be sitting on disk with no way to identify them automatically. The only real solution is to remove all thumbnails and let CS-Cart regenerate them. Just be careful doing this on a live store — thumbnail generation can put a heavy load on the server, especially with large originals. I’d recommend doing it during off-peak hours and then browsing the storefront to warm up the thumbnail cache. If your server has plenty of CPU cores, enabling the lazy_thumbnails tweak can also help by generating thumbnails in parallel.
Also, do you really need to back up the entire images directory every single day? Unless the image library changes constantly, that sounds like overkill to me.
As for storing images on a separate server, if you’re using a VPS/VDS, you can mount the images directory from another server. A system administrator, DevOps engineer, or even ChatGPT can explain the available options.
You could also experiment with Amazon S3. CS-Cart still contains S3 support in the codebase, although it’s been hidden from the UI and hasn’t been officially tested for many years. There may also be Marketplace add-ons that provide S3 integration.
And for what it’s worth, I’ve already added my +1 to the S3 integration feature request.
I’m not sure I understand the connection between using a CDN and the Admin Panel issues you’re describing.
By itself, a CDN shouldn’t affect the admin area. In CS-Cart, it’s mainly used to serve static assets (such as images) by replacing your server’s URLs with CDN URLs. The Admin Panel should otherwise continue working as usual.
If you’re experiencing slow uploads, delayed saves, or other admin-related problems only when the CDN is enabled, it sounds more like a CDN configuration issue or something specific to the provider you’re using, rather than a limitation of CS-Cart itself.
Are you using CS-Cart’s built-in CDN support, or some third-party integration/service?
A 400 GB images directory can happen on large stores, but the core issue is that CS‑Cart currently provides no official option for FTP upload or external image storage. If such an option existed as a built‑in feature, it would solve major problems for medium and large stores:
Daily backups would become much faster and cheaper
The main server would no longer carry unnecessary I/O and CPU load
Stores could use affordable external storage servers
The whole system would become more scalable and efficient
We agree that checking thumbnails is useful, but the main problem is the lack of a selectable storage location for images. Even with perfect thumbnail cleanup, the original images still occupy hundreds of gigabytes, making backups slow and expensive.
Our request is:
Please add FTP / Remote Storage support as an official, built‑in option in CS‑Cart.
This feature is essential for large stores, and its absence creates significant operational and financial overhead.
We would greatly appreciate it if this could be considered for future releases.