Friday, February 3, 2006
When Smugmug Says "Unlimited Storage", They Apparently Mean It
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 04:00 PM
When a company says they offer "unlimited" anything, I always take that promise with a grain of salt, because what they really mean is "we'll offer you unlimited resources until we start to lose too much money on you". A perfect example of this is WestHost, a Web hosting company that was home to Pocket PC Thoughts for half a year or so. They offered me unlimited bandwidth, and this is back when I was on shared servers and bandwidth was costing me $200+ a month. I gladly took them up on their offer, but within a few months they were telling me I was using too much bandwidth. :roll: Their integrity was a matter of gigabytes.
Apparently, not so with Smugmug. They offer unlimited storage even with their basic $39.95 a year package. Given the constant climb of megapixels, image sizes get bigger and bigger every year - making this a bold claim on the part of Smugmug. Well, it seems someone decided to take Smugmug up on that promise. Here's the message from a user named bl8ter that started it all:
"I am currently considering joining smugmug, but have a serious problem. Over the last 2 years I have amassed 2484.98 GIGS (yes that is 2+ terabytes) which is stored over way to [sic] many dvds. Now if my calculations are correct it would take me 103360 hours, 12 minutes and 4 seconds under optimal connections to load my albums. I have a cable connection with a 60Kb upload rate."
And here's the response from Smugmug's CEO:
"Wow, that must be close to 500,000 JPEGs! Quite a collection - I can't wait to see them. So we've always said "unlimited storage" and we mean what we say. We're happy to take your photos and host them, but we need a little time to prepare. Just so you know, this is something like a $20,000 first-year commitment for us in terms of disk space, power, cooling, and physical space. You'll basically have two complete RAID arrays to yourself in our datacenter. Of course, you'll only pay your $30, $50, or $100 per year, depending on your account level. Again, we're happy to do it - but I want to be up front here and let you know that we need to order some equipment and get it installed to accept your photos.
We're not geared for accepting 2.5TB overnight. We'll also be buying extra image processing machines just for your batch of photos. Luckily, once yours are done, everyone else at smugmug will get to benefit from them, so I don't consider that a cost to host you. Does that sound fair? Can we ask you to hold off while we order and install the equipment and power required?"
Is that an impressive customer service attitude or what? Most companies would have said "Look, when we say unlimited, we mean within reason!", but Smugmug took it in stride and simply asked for time to gear up for the task. That impresses me to no end - there are many companies that could learn from a corporate attitude like that. Maybe someone should tell BonusPrint.
[As an aside, I have to wonder about someone who shoots that many photos - he's either a world-class photographer that manages to make every shot fantastic, or he's someone with an OCD disorder that can't selectivey delete his images to cull the good from the bad. You decide. ;-)]
Apparently, not so with Smugmug. They offer unlimited storage even with their basic $39.95 a year package. Given the constant climb of megapixels, image sizes get bigger and bigger every year - making this a bold claim on the part of Smugmug. Well, it seems someone decided to take Smugmug up on that promise. Here's the message from a user named bl8ter that started it all:
"I am currently considering joining smugmug, but have a serious problem. Over the last 2 years I have amassed 2484.98 GIGS (yes that is 2+ terabytes) which is stored over way to [sic] many dvds. Now if my calculations are correct it would take me 103360 hours, 12 minutes and 4 seconds under optimal connections to load my albums. I have a cable connection with a 60Kb upload rate."
And here's the response from Smugmug's CEO:
"Wow, that must be close to 500,000 JPEGs! Quite a collection - I can't wait to see them. So we've always said "unlimited storage" and we mean what we say. We're happy to take your photos and host them, but we need a little time to prepare. Just so you know, this is something like a $20,000 first-year commitment for us in terms of disk space, power, cooling, and physical space. You'll basically have two complete RAID arrays to yourself in our datacenter. Of course, you'll only pay your $30, $50, or $100 per year, depending on your account level. Again, we're happy to do it - but I want to be up front here and let you know that we need to order some equipment and get it installed to accept your photos.
We're not geared for accepting 2.5TB overnight. We'll also be buying extra image processing machines just for your batch of photos. Luckily, once yours are done, everyone else at smugmug will get to benefit from them, so I don't consider that a cost to host you. Does that sound fair? Can we ask you to hold off while we order and install the equipment and power required?"
Is that an impressive customer service attitude or what? Most companies would have said "Look, when we say unlimited, we mean within reason!", but Smugmug took it in stride and simply asked for time to gear up for the task. That impresses me to no end - there are many companies that could learn from a corporate attitude like that. Maybe someone should tell BonusPrint.
[As an aside, I have to wonder about someone who shoots that many photos - he's either a world-class photographer that manages to make every shot fantastic, or he's someone with an OCD disorder that can't selectivey delete his images to cull the good from the bad. You decide. ;-)]
