I agree wholeheartedly with this article except for the part about s3/cloudfront being the only tool for storing binary assets. MongoDB's GridFS extension does

I agree wholeheartedly with this article except for the part about s3/cloudfront being the only tool for storing binary assets. MongoDB's GridFS extension does a fine job of handling files in the database since they shard and replicate just like database records. As for serving them out, you can run it on a cheap unmetered server using nginx + http://github.com/mdirolf/nginx-gridfs http://github.com/mdirolf/nginx-gridfs