I'm hoping to reach someone with some experience using a service like Amazon's S3 with this question. On my site we have a dedicated image server. And on this server, we have an automatic 404 redirect through Apapche so that, if a user tries to access an image that doesn't exist, they'll see a snazzy "Image Not Available" image.
We're looking to move the hosting of these images to a cloud storage solution (S3 or Rackspace's CloudFiles), and I'm wondering if anyone's had any success replicating this behavior on a cloud storage service and if so how they did it.
THe Amazon instances are just like normal hosted server instances once they are up and running so your Apache configuration could assumedly be identical to what you currently have.
Your only issue will be where to store the images. The new Amazon Elastic Block Store makes it easy to mount a drive based on S3 backed data. You could store all your images on such a volume and use it with your Apache instance.