Case Study: Rethumb achieves scalable, cost-effective image storage and fast thumbnail delivery with DreamHost (DreamObjects)

Making Painless Thumbnails a Reality

Rethumb, founded by Portuguese software engineer Pedro Verruma, provides an HTTP API for image manipulation — creating thumbnails, resizing images and extracting EXIF data — aimed at automating a once-manual, error-prone process. The main challenge was building a scalable, cost-effective way to store and serve processed images (potentially terabytes), while keeping PUT/GET costs low and integrating easily with existing PHP tools.

Rethumb’s stack uses nginx, PHP, MySQL and DreamObjects for storage, caching processed images and enabling fast responses. Because DreamObjects is S3-compatible and economical (minimal operation costs), it integrated smoothly with Rethumb’s PHP libraries, became a central, stable component of the service, and let the team focus on improving the API and adding features rather than worrying about storage scale and cost.

Rethumb

Pedro Verruma

Founder