Imagehost for a site - What hosting will do?

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The web hosting thread below was started by Safin_ on 2010-01-23 05:52:41:

I am looking to have a dedicated imagehost for one of my sites. Users till now have been using external image hosts but most do not allow hotlinking and that is creating an issue.

My main requirements are.

• The number of users having the rights to upload images will be limited. Max 50 users will have rights to use this imagehost. No guest uploads. Imagehosting script will be in php.
• The photos will be hotlinked on our site. (but hopefully via htaccess should disallow hotlinking anywhere else)
• Am not sure how much Bandwidth this will take up. The site has a forum and we are 20K in alexa or roundabouts.
• Expect to use approx 5-7GB of space initially with sufficient left for future months.

Can you advise me on some hosting plans for this setup. Would i necessarily need a dedicated server for this or one of those good shared hosting will do too? What specs should i look for)

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