  Content-rich websites typically house their images as individual files or as
more costly binary database objects. Both methods place high demands on storage
resources with commensurate high monetary cost. Inexpensive shared service
accounts come with strict limits on disk and computing resources which prevent
their use for hosting content-rich websites. To minimize the load on these
limited resources, large numbers of images or other records may be concatenated
into a single file and delivered with short latency independent of location
within the file using Linux utility dd. This solution and its performance are
presented for (a) a website which houses 8000+ genealogical reference books
with more than 3.5 million 250-Kbyte page images, (b) a website-based database
of 86 million death records, and (c) a cluster computing application which
utilizes 800 neuroimaging databases, each with 1.5 million records. These
disparate applications demonstrate the efficacy, scalability, and general
utility of the solution.
