To take advantage of the MEDIA_URL in the settings.py file for hosting your static media on a separate server, you need to do a little internal work on your templates and some work to make that setting available to the templates. Inside a template, where you would normally have: {{{ blah blah this is a foo blah blah.. }}} You would instead insert {{ MEDIA_URL }} so that it would look like: {{{ blah blah this is a foo blah blah.. }}} It generally requires a big search and replace the first time you implement it. After that, seeing other references in the templates has been enough to remind me to use {{ MEDIA_URL }} before any static content. We could pass {{ MEDIA_URL }} in through each view, but since we'll want it throughout the site, it's often easier to set up a simple context processor to do the heavy lifting. Note: There is a default media context processor since version 1.0. You can access using {{ MEDIA_URL }} in your templates. Then in the settings.py under TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS, add: {{{ "django.core.context_processors.media", }}} But if you are still on django 0.96: Here's a example snippet from a context process: {{{ from django.conf import settings def common(request): return {'MEDIA_URL': settings.MEDIA_URL} }}} Then in the settings.py under TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS, we added: "mysite.context_processors.common", and from there, the MEDIA_URL in settings.py became available in all templates as {{ MEDIA_URL }}.