An interesting choice of solution there for image hosting... I would have thought they would have gone with a simple proxy through to an object store like S3, GCS, Wasabi, insert other clone here. Or even picked an off the shelf BLOB capable system for self hosting like Mongo or Cassandra. Then your image hosting becomes stateless as you just give each image a flake ID, pop it in the storage system and give back a shortened URL. I'm sure they had their reasons though :-)