Social Network Storage

You could use Cloudflare + AWS S3 with a (semi) cookieless domain and heavy caching. The heavy caching will drastically reduce your S3 bill - and it will be blazing fast and scalable. Since you're using Laravel, you can change the ASSET_URL env variable to reflect your CDN URL. Additionally, the Laravel filesystem supports S3 out of the box, allowing you to upload user content directly to S3.

Good luck!

I am currently using S3 + Cloudfront on AWS for a social site with ~2k users. It costs less than $0.20 / mo and the users are distributed across the globe.

One key changed I made recently was uploading the images to my application server and then to S3 was very slow (like 4-8s) for users in Asia. I modified the client so it would upload directly to S3 which dropped the upload time significantly and made it way more reliable.

I've seen many cases where apps have allowed uploads but not tracked file meta like day uploaded and user account. Doing that will allow you to purge uploaded data when a user deletes their account. Additionally, you can move old, seldom used files to slower, cheaper storage.

Good luck,