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10/09/2009 02:05:46 PM · #26 |
I tried both Smugmug and Zenfolio when I was ready to move past Flickr and get a real website. I ended up sticking with Smugmug. I like it a lot. Nice customizations available. A great support community at Dgrin.com.
Take A Hike Photography
And the downtime yesterday was a hardware failure, so not a normal occurrence and I don't think it was just a Canadian problem.
I keep their "status updates" on my RSS reader:
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A critical part of our infrastructure failed this morning and its backup is having issues as well. Our engineers are looking into it and will restore service as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience.
07:26 PDT – we’ve identified the problem and were able to fix it. now to bring everything else back online, sorry for the delay
07:45 – we’re in read-only, verifying everything is OK before we put everything back
07:50 – sorry, spoke too soon. a few components still need attention before even read-only. we’re working as fast as we can, sorry for the continued delay
10:09 – all clear. sorry about that. we’ve identified several areas of improvement to avoid this in the future.
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Message edited by author 2009-10-09 14:06:32. |
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10/09/2009 04:07:30 PM · #27 |
Originally posted by Stiger:
I tried both Smugmug and Zenfolio when I was ready to move past Flickr and get a real website. I ended up sticking with Smugmug. I like it a lot. Nice customizations available. A great support community at Dgrin.com.
Take A Hike Photography
And the downtime yesterday was a hardware failure, so not a normal occurrence and I don't think it was just a Canadian problem.
I keep their "status updates" on my RSS reader:
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A critical part of our infrastructure failed this morning and its backup is having issues as well. Our engineers are looking into it and will restore service as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience.
07:26 PDT – we’ve identified the problem and were able to fix it. now to bring everything else back online, sorry for the delay
07:45 – we’re in read-only, verifying everything is OK before we put everything back
07:50 – sorry, spoke too soon. a few components still need attention before even read-only. we’re working as fast as we can, sorry for the continued delay
10:09 – all clear. sorry about that. we’ve identified several areas of improvement to avoid this in the future.
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You also have a nice site and great photos, Eric. Kudos.
As for Smugmug, any system as large and complex as they are is practically guaranteed to run into issues eventually, both in hardware and software. One of the things that I really like about them is their speed at fixing any problems that do crop up. They're also fast at coming out with cool new features. I've been with them for years and they just keep getting better and better.
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10/09/2009 08:09:03 PM · #28 |
Originally posted by Mick:
Originally posted by tjbel05:
I use smugmug for the last two years.
My site my site |
Nice site Tammy, and great photos too! |
Thank you Mick! |
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10/09/2009 09:20:19 PM · #29 |
Originally posted by GabrielS:
My website is also hosted by Zenfolio My site
It's very funny to see different customizations between users, i even did not recognize RKT as a zenfolio hosted website! |
That's because I'm no longer at Zenfolio. I went back to P-base. The reason I left Zenfolio was because some people had problems viewing my galleries. I ultimately prefer the non flash type of viewing I can get at P-base....no load times, just click and you're in. Zenfolio also kept promising certain things and never delivered. I can do more "customizing" over at P-base also. Now granted P-base is not without it's problems as anyone who has an account over there knows this. They died for about 5 days. But they are back and I will stay with them. It seems no one is perfect.
Also,  Librodo hosts his images over at P-base, so it really can't be all that bad right? And another thing, you get way more traffic over at P-base then Zenfolio and probably Smugmug. I like to share my work with others so it makes sense to do that at a place that has plenty of viewers. For $23.00 a year, I think P-base is a deal.
: } |
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10/14/2009 06:56:14 PM · #30 |
Now I only went through a trial with smugmug so I'm by no means an expert, but I noticed two outages in that time. I then googled to see if this was common or not, and this isn't the only forum where smugmug downtime is discussed. It seems to have been a fairly recent thing (in the last few months). Perhaps it wasn't widely noticed because of the times it went down? Another worrying thing for me that I read about is that Smugmug has frequent "updates" that are scheduled maintenance windows occurring weekly. These are also indicative of downtime, especially if it's happening every week.
Don't get me wrong though Smugmug is still a great site and perhaps a lot of what I read could just have been in the past (and these issues are now solved) so I recommend that anyone prospective client of either site use the trial function and take advantage of the discounts that both offer when purchasing (see previous page). |
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10/17/2009 09:06:31 AM · #31 |
For what it's worth I had a few family members test the site from various parts of the world (including Canada):
The general consensus is that Smugmug "seems" to load faster. Now it's strange but when I actually had them time the load times what they noticed is that the pictures actually loaded in roughly the same amount of time. However Zenfolio does not display the image until it's fully loaded (it does that Mac thing where you have the square sort of "loading" while your picture is displaying) and Smugmug just displays the image as it loads. This gives it the appearance of loading faster.
Anyway with either once of them speed is not the issue.
The main problem is the "downtime". Smugmug has a lot of scheduled and unscheduled downtime compared with Zenfolio. Might not be as big a deal if you are in the North American time zone, but most of their scheduled down would probably be more noticeable to customers in other time zones. This may be a more recent issue though, and hopefully they'll resolve it soon.
________________
If you'd like you can get $5 off either service by using the following codes:
Zenfolio:
9MS-YYH-CBP
Smugmug:
MjmiE0xAHBhwQ
Message edited by author 2009-10-17 09:07:11. |
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11/26/2009 04:13:12 AM · #32 |
thanks for all the thoughts in this thread.
I have just signed up to Zenfolio and am checking it out to use as a wedding photography proofing and purchasing site. I have always just proofed on my own website and taken print order manually through email but this time the wedding couple are across the planet, so I need something that can offering printing locally.
Any other thoughts of great sites to challenge Zenfolio?
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