vincentosullivan wrote: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!