Serious question....not a criticism!

[juliano]

Okay, the last few days have been frustrating and no doubt Slug and his tiny crew have been working flat out to put things in order.

But I understand that PBase is really just Slug and two able helpers, both college students (happy to be corrected on that one). This begs the question - what happens if Slug is ill, hit by a car, drops dead or whatever - who administers PBase then? What if it all goes tits-up; who will be around to fix it?

I'm not a fan of top heavy administration, but perhaps Slug needs to consider a team of admins spread around the globe who could help, even on a voluntary basis to start with? I'm no techie so perhaps there are technical reasons why this can't be done, but I am concerned that the load for Slug will soon be too much and we'll suffer a much more catastrophic loss.

Like I said - this isn't a criticism, just a concern. By and large I think Slug and Co. do a first rate job and PBase is the premier photo hosting site on the web.

Regards,

David.

[juliano]

Well, you have the option of saving your own images before you even place them on Pbase. If any one image is so precious, back it up.
The idea of "what if something should happen";
after all they are only images (not nearly as important as a life)
I think Pbase is a wonderful opportunity for photographers to share and learn from. For me, the experience has made me want to create better images, not save the the old ones. I understand that family photographs are usually to be saved... no reason not to save and to share with some small risk. ???

[vincentosullivan]

...you have the option of saving your own images before you even place them on Pbase...
...after all they are only images...

I think You're missing the point. It's not about storing originals on PBase. Few people would be dumb enough to do that. It's about:

the time invested in creating, organising, uploading to and labelling the galleries, and
letting other people know where your pictures are being hosted

There's not much point in investing much time and effort into either, if the sites permanence is limited by the fact that it's basically a one-man amateur (in the best sense) effort.

Vince.

[srijith]

There's not much point in investing much time and effort into either, if the sites permanence is limited by the fact that it's basically a one-man amateur (in the best sense) effort.
Vince.[/color]

On the onset let me clarify that I am not trying to defend slug and the team, but let us just think about it for a second.
- 3,114,940 photos as of July 2003
- 168,916 users
- 7,212 of them registered
- No loss of data so far
- Only one big downtime - 2 days (I think), even then half of that time, most pictures were available.
- $23 yearly for 100 MB of disk space, with unlimited bandwidth usage. Compare this with $49.99/year for Yahoo 100MB mailbox or $20/y for 40MB MSN space (=$50/100MB).

Calling slug and team an "amateur" would be correct if it is solely based on the fact that slug and team is (still?) in college. By performance, they outsmart a lot of service providers I have dealt with. My old web hosting provider, whom I used to pay $10/m, had his servers and hard disks crashing so much that I am sure I have lost data at least 3 times - even when I used to backup every week!

Almost no question goes unanswered in the forum (which now has a new and improved interface) and I have yet to see any critical issue brought up that has not been resolved in a maximum of a day. Even the present service outage that is triggering so much discussions was not because of any of slug's or his team's inability. A bug in Oracle software corrupted the database. The reason why there was a delay was because slug wanted to retrieve all the data (and they did).

To me, personally they are pros. I have a web hosting plan that provides me about 600MB of HDD space, but still I host my pictures here, because I am more confident of the uptime and responsiveness of pbase than that of my present provider!

I wish alot more people, at least thos who have been using pbase regularly and have seen its power, could become paying members. Now that slug has stopped supporting free membership, I hope a lot more people would pay up, not because of pity, not because of any community feeling, but simpley because they are getting a terrific service for such a cheap cost!

[rach1966]

but simpley because they are getting a terrific service for such a cheap cost!

I have to agree, it is a terrific service.

Rachel


some of my travel pictures

[jchambers]

Agree also. I'm really happy with pbase.

If you look at the other sites out there, they are cluttered, filled with ads or provide too many restrictions (on file size, no style sheets etc)

Pbase is simply about your photo's. It works, and it works well.

Sure, there are always a few improvements to be had, and they are coming around in due time, but have a look at the competition - in my opinion pbase is the best

[vincentosullivan]

There's not much point in investing much time and effort into either, if the sites permanence is limited by the fact that it's basically a one-man amateur (in the best sense) effort.
Vince.

On the onset let me clarify that I am not trying to defend slug and the Calling slug and team an "amateur" would be correct if it is solely based on the fact that slug and team is (still?) in college.

I have no problem at all with the service provided and agree that it is excellent. PBase is most definitely not amateurish. The problem (and the reason I used the word amateur) is in reference to the fact that PBase appears to be basically a one-man operation. It is not clear if PBase has become a viable, self-sustaining enterprise or if it is still one man's labour of love. For long term viability, the day-to-day running of the system must be a process which is independent of a single named individual.

Vince.

[juliano]

There's not much point in investing much time and effort into either, if the sites permanence is limited by the fact that it's basically a one-man amateur (in the best sense) effort.
Vince.[/color]

On the onset let me clarify that I am not trying to defend slug and the team, but let us just think about it for a second.
- 3,114,940 photos as of July 2003
- 168,916 users
- 7,212 of them registered
- No loss of data so far
- Only one big downtime - 2 days (I think), even then half of that time, most pictures were available.
- $23 yearly for 100 MB of disk space, with unlimited bandwidth usage. Compare this with $49.99/year for Yahoo 100MB mailbox or $20/y for 40MB MSN space (=$50/100MB).

Calling slug and team an "amateur" would be correct if it is solely based on the fact that slug and team is (still?) in college. By performance, they outsmart a lot of service providers I have dealt with. My old web hosting provider, whom I used to pay $10/m, had his servers and hard disks crashing so much that I am sure I have lost data at least 3 times - even when I used to backup every week!

Almost no question goes unanswered in the forum (which now has a new and improved interface) and I have yet to see any critical issue brought up that has not been resolved in a maximum of a day. Even the present service outage that is triggering so much discussions was not because of any of slug's or his team's inability. A bug in Oracle software corrupted the database. The reason why there was a delay was because slug wanted to retrieve all the data (and they did).

To me, personally they are pros. I have a web hosting plan that provides me about 600MB of HDD space, but still I host my pictures here, because I am more confident of the uptime and responsiveness of pbase than that of my present provider!

I wish alot more people, at least thos who have been using pbase regularly and have seen its power, could become paying members. Now that slug has stopped supporting free membership, I hope a lot more people would pay up, not because of pity, not because of any community feeling, but simpley because they are getting a terrific service for such a cheap cost!