Hmmm. I guess DG didn't like the reply I was writing, when I tried to post it, it dumped me out. Very nice.
To summarize, SM has problems it needs to address. Been in hi-tech 30 years - networks, servers, end-users, software test, etc. I appreciate the problems and complexities, but I pay for a Pro site, not one run that looks and behaves like it's run by a 12 year old on a 486 Win95 PC, which is the situation right now.
Why does SM allow access to my site when it's unusable? That leaves a wonderful impression for my customers and yours. SM, get a glove and get in the game, or drop the alleged Pro offering. I am so glad I use GoDaddy to host my main site with SM as the e-commerce end. A little less pain if I have to drop them for a more reliable, and responsive provider.
SM, you can't measure the customers and sales your clients have lost due to your outages, or how many potential clients you've lost.
the site worked for a whole minute before a 'Scheduled Maintenance in Progress' is now showing up.
This is better than a site that half loads or getting the Smugmug homepage, which only makes OUR clients think that they input the addresses wrong but after a couple of tries they just go else where.........
It might have something to do that when push comes to shove, we pay Mom'n'Pop prices for the services...
I disagree -- SM's pricing is in line with similar sites. In the end, though, it's not really my problem -- if SM isn't charging enough to keep their site reliable, they need to rethink their pricing model.
For sure, it's a get-what-you-pay-for world. But that hasn't stopped Smugmug from advertising way more than it delivers.
Look, I'm all for getting things sorted, but let's not get carried away. Smugmug has good service and delivers a good product. This is notably a bad week and they seemed to have piled on the mistakes today, but let's not over exaggerate. When the service is up and it normally is, its pretty darn good.
As a customer for 6+ years I don't think they advertise more than they deliver, but YMMV.
Their "minute or two" to replace bad hardware has long passed. Please stop with the stupid wishful guesses - just say the site is down and will be back up as soon as possible, try to keep it simple and realistic.
Mom & Pop ain't the phrase in my mind right now. More like amateurs way in over their head.
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i like coffeeRegistered UsersPosts: 6Beginner grinner
edited April 1, 2010
Choosing a photo hosting site isn't like federally-mandated healthcare .... you DO have a choice when it comes to choosing your site! Maybe those of you who aren't happy should shop around.
Not me. Here's what my site looks like (screengrab hosted by pbase... which makes it especially scary that pbase has service when SM has been down for hours now)
as of 11:16pm PDT, the main SM, as well as my site, is back up and running....time will tell. I still I will not re-up. I am forced to depend on SM for the next couple weeks, but by then I will begin moving my critical images off and back to my own server...with it's maybe 4-hrs downtime over the past 5-years.
EDIT:
Yeah, RO mode...but that is FINE for now. Well, it would have been fine 8hrs ago.
Choosing a photo hosting site isn't like federally-mandated healthcare .... you DO have a choice when it comes to choosing your site! Maybe those of you who aren't happy should shop around.
Wow, I was waiting for someone to blame Obama! Now this thread is complete!
Choosing a photo hosting site isn't like federally-mandated healthcare .... you DO have a choice when it comes to choosing your site! Maybe those of you who aren't happy should shop around.
Well, it's not like we're using this for free. We paid for something that's not performing as advertised. And there's impact to changing providers. And we DO have the right to speak up to those that have taken our money to provide that service, in hopes they'll get their act together.
Drive to your grocery store and try to walk in only to find the doors locked at random times during normal business hours for no good reason. Or you get in and none of the registers are working, several days a week. That would be fun, right? Sound like good business practice to you?
SM is how we represent ourselves to our clients, and when it sucks, our clients think we do. And then maybe no sale. No sale = no money. No money = a negative business experience because of SM, who we paid and trusted to give us a POSITIVE business experience. Get the idea?
And drop the healthcare diversion crap, stay on topic.
Well, it's not like we're using this for free. We paid for something that's not performing as advertised. And there's impact to changing providers. And we DO have the right to speak up to those that have taken our money to provide that service, in hopes they'll get their act together.
Drive to your grocery store and try to walk in only to find the doors locked at random times during normal business hours for no good reason. Or you get in and none of the registers are working, several days a week. That would be fun, right? Sound like good business practice to you?
SM is how we represent ourselves to our clients, and when it sucks, our clients think we do. And then maybe no sale. No sale = no money. No money = a negative business experience because of SM, who we paid and trusted to give us a POSITIVE business experience. Get the idea?
And drop the healthcare diversion crap, stay on topic.
Well, it's not like we're using this for free. We paid for something that's not performing as advertised. And there's impact to changing providers. And we DO have the right to speak up to those that have taken our money to provide that service, in hopes they'll get their act together.
Drive to your grocery store and try to walk in only to find the doors locked at random times during normal business hours for no good reason. Or you get in and none of the registers are working, several days a week. That would be fun, right? Sound like good business practice to you?
SM is how we represent ourselves to our clients, and when it sucks, our clients think we do. And then maybe no sale. No sale = no money. No money = a negative business experience because of SM, who we paid and trusted to give us a POSITIVE business experience. Get the idea?
And drop the healthcare diversion crap, stay on topic.
Sometimes you buy milk and you get home and the milk stinks.
Great answer to my last paragraph, maybe try reading the first one.
And I love when all the answers are "It's that simple" - awwww silly me, everything is just so simple. Sunshine and flowery fields everywhere, not a care in the world because it's all so simple. Now I feel better :ivar
My site's fully back up. I appreciate the hard work that smugmug is doing behind the scenes to rectify faults, faults take place in any system, but just wish the down time would occur slightly less often.
I wonder if it would be possible for Smugmug to send out a heads-up email as soon as possible when the service crashes catastrophically. That way Smugmug users - pros especially - would at least have the opportunity to go into damage-control mode. Clients could be informed and schedules could be changed. It would be better than finding out about the service disruption from a client, as many posters here apparently have.
In this day and age of ubiquitous smart-phone use, Smugmuggers would be likely to get a service-outage heads-up email in a reasonably timely fasion. Even if it only amounted to having the wherewithal to decide to temporarily hold off on sending sombody to my site, that would be a significant difference.
I realize that this idea doesn't actually solve the underlying problem, but it would go a long way towards shoring-up the communication issue.
Everything seems to be ok, status.blogs.smugmug says everything is ok. My username.com looks fine, but smugmug.username.com is still way screwed up. Something still wrong?
Like others... kinda a bad time.
After looking completely unprofessional in all of my blogs, social networks and website for 7 hours... and after performing emergency damage control with three waiting client's designers (including a gubernatorial candidate, waiting to go to press,) I gave my weekly seminar. So certain was I that our SM gurus would have things fixed, I actually brought it up live on the projector (bad idea, I know)...
Now 20 photographers are not only making jokes about my partner choices as their educator, but SM in general as an amateurish option. Apparently no amount of talking will stay the giggling...
Sad, but I really like the vibe of the company (especially after meeting everyone at WPPI!)
Drat. Thanks for all your hard work guys and gals. We really do appreciate you! Of course, the infrastructure needs to be improved. Of course it's a mom-and-pop company that's blowing up. Of course they should rethink their pricing strategies to support the growth. Of course we Pro's are losing money while they're down (I lost, concretely, more that 4x the annual cost of my SM membership in this outage alone.) Certainly they'll do something... please do!
Please bring the "site is having problems" message back
It seems like a long time ago...
There used to be a message shown on our sites when smug was having problems. There were complaints from some pro photogs, and the message was changed to show only when folks were trying to buy.
In the several hours of bad behavior last night, I never saw a message on my site. It was behaving poorly enough that I couldn't get in to post my own "site problems" message. I did post a message on my blog (don't bother to look, it's gone now since my photos are showing properly again) in an attempt to tell people what was going on, and to encourage them to try again later.
Last night the site behavior warranted a message on our sites - and there was nothing there during the times that I checked.
Please bring the site status message back when there are situation like that of March 31st.
I still say we need a corrective action report posted and made available to all customers of SM.
As a quality manager, when things go wrong in my company, our customers require such. They don't care why things go sideways, they do want to know what is being done to prevent further occurrence, in detail. We won't get by with, "were working on it, sorry". It is only good business practice and keeps a company on track with proper science of resolution through plan-do-check-act cycle, as well as bolster and customer communication and confidence.
Next would be a preventative action report for SM internal team. That would address what measures will be taken to prevent loss time and deficiencies that have not occurred as of yet.
Without that, an should there continue to be frequent maintenance windows and more then 1% down time, I am not sure that I can continue with SM come renewal. That is just a shame.
R. Leonardo www.RobArtPhoto.com Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans
Oh, and thanks for getting it up and running again!
R. Leonardo www.RobArtPhoto.com Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans
It's morning, my site is still screwed up. The banner is missing, the slideshow on the homepate is showing big and small pictures. There are red x's everywhere...so it looks just like it did last night. I'm very upset about this, not the kind of service I expect.
April Fools!
My site is fine, all my pictures are there! So, what was the problem?
My site is back up, but I have a lot of problems uploading my files. Checksum error, invalid format....
The weird thing about the checksum error I have, it says that xxxxxxx is not matching xxxxxxxx, but it is the exact same checksum, so it's probably more a programming error than a real checksum error.
Comments
I've been investigating the next steps to expand my business, and I have to say that I will take a long hard look at photo hosting services and SLAs.
To summarize, SM has problems it needs to address. Been in hi-tech 30 years - networks, servers, end-users, software test, etc. I appreciate the problems and complexities, but I pay for a Pro site, not one run that looks and behaves like it's run by a 12 year old on a 486 Win95 PC, which is the situation right now.
Why does SM allow access to my site when it's unusable? That leaves a wonderful impression for my customers and yours. SM, get a glove and get in the game, or drop the alleged Pro offering. I am so glad I use GoDaddy to host my main site with SM as the e-commerce end. A little less pain if I have to drop them for a more reliable, and responsive provider.
SM, you can't measure the customers and sales your clients have lost due to your outages, or how many potential clients you've lost.
It might have something to do that when push comes to shove, we pay Mom'n'Pop prices for the services...
-John Muir
http://www.austinbphotography.com
Nature Photographers Community
Founding Member
http://www.smugmug.com/community/NaturePhotographers
I've looked at lots of sites and chose SmugMug over Zenfolio.
What else is out there?
Bear
Some of my photos on Flickr
My Facebook
This is better than a site that half loads or getting the Smugmug homepage, which only makes OUR clients think that they input the addresses wrong but after a couple of tries they just go else where.........
I disagree -- SM's pricing is in line with similar sites. In the end, though, it's not really my problem -- if SM isn't charging enough to keep their site reliable, they need to rethink their pricing model.
Look, I'm all for getting things sorted, but let's not get carried away. Smugmug has good service and delivers a good product. This is notably a bad week and they seemed to have piled on the mistakes today, but let's not over exaggerate. When the service is up and it normally is, its pretty darn good.
As a customer for 6+ years I don't think they advertise more than they deliver, but YMMV.
Mom & Pop ain't the phrase in my mind right now. More like amateurs way in over their head.
shopping cart and log in is still read only, however.
-John Muir
http://www.austinbphotography.com
Nature Photographers Community
Founding Member
http://www.smugmug.com/community/NaturePhotographers
Not me. Here's what my site looks like (screengrab hosted by pbase... which makes it especially scary that pbase has service when SM has been down for hours now)
Portland, Oregon Photographer Pete Springer
website blog instagram facebook g+
EDIT:
Yeah, RO mode...but that is FINE for now. Well, it would have been fine 8hrs ago.
Wow, I was waiting for someone to blame Obama! Now this thread is complete!
http://ssklar.smugmug.com
I blame Woodrow Wilson. Everything since then has been fallout.
-John Muir
http://www.austinbphotography.com
Nature Photographers Community
Founding Member
http://www.smugmug.com/community/NaturePhotographers
Well, it's not like we're using this for free. We paid for something that's not performing as advertised. And there's impact to changing providers. And we DO have the right to speak up to those that have taken our money to provide that service, in hopes they'll get their act together.
Drive to your grocery store and try to walk in only to find the doors locked at random times during normal business hours for no good reason. Or you get in and none of the registers are working, several days a week. That would be fun, right? Sound like good business practice to you?
SM is how we represent ourselves to our clients, and when it sucks, our clients think we do. And then maybe no sale. No sale = no money. No money = a negative business experience because of SM, who we paid and trusted to give us a POSITIVE business experience. Get the idea?
And drop the healthcare diversion crap, stay on topic.
Then go somewhere else! It's that simple!
Sometimes you buy milk and you get home and the milk stinks.
It's life......it's not perfect....things happen.
Bear
Some of my photos on Flickr
My Facebook
Great answer to my last paragraph, maybe try reading the first one.
And I love when all the answers are "It's that simple" - awwww silly me, everything is just so simple. Sunshine and flowery fields everywhere, not a care in the world because it's all so simple. Now I feel better :ivar
In this day and age of ubiquitous smart-phone use, Smugmuggers would be likely to get a service-outage heads-up email in a reasonably timely fasion. Even if it only amounted to having the wherewithal to decide to temporarily hold off on sending sombody to my site, that would be a significant difference.
I realize that this idea doesn't actually solve the underlying problem, but it would go a long way towards shoring-up the communication issue.
www.djdigitaldave.net
www.GwagDesigns.com | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr
After looking completely unprofessional in all of my blogs, social networks and website for 7 hours... and after performing emergency damage control with three waiting client's designers (including a gubernatorial candidate, waiting to go to press,) I gave my weekly seminar. So certain was I that our SM gurus would have things fixed, I actually brought it up live on the projector (bad idea, I know)...
Now 20 photographers are not only making jokes about my partner choices as their educator, but SM in general as an amateurish option. Apparently no amount of talking will stay the giggling...
Sad, but I really like the vibe of the company (especially after meeting everyone at WPPI!)
Drat. Thanks for all your hard work guys and gals. We really do appreciate you! Of course, the infrastructure needs to be improved. Of course it's a mom-and-pop company that's blowing up. Of course they should rethink their pricing strategies to support the growth. Of course we Pro's are losing money while they're down (I lost, concretely, more that 4x the annual cost of my SM membership in this outage alone.) Certainly they'll do something... please do!
It seems like a long time ago...
There used to be a message shown on our sites when smug was having problems. There were complaints from some pro photogs, and the message was changed to show only when folks were trying to buy.
In the several hours of bad behavior last night, I never saw a message on my site. It was behaving poorly enough that I couldn't get in to post my own "site problems" message. I did post a message on my blog (don't bother to look, it's gone now since my photos are showing properly again) in an attempt to tell people what was going on, and to encourage them to try again later.
Last night the site behavior warranted a message on our sites - and there was nothing there during the times that I checked.
Please bring the site status message back when there are situation like that of March 31st.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
As a quality manager, when things go wrong in my company, our customers require such. They don't care why things go sideways, they do want to know what is being done to prevent further occurrence, in detail. We won't get by with, "were working on it, sorry". It is only good business practice and keeps a company on track with proper science of resolution through plan-do-check-act cycle, as well as bolster and customer communication and confidence.
Next would be a preventative action report for SM internal team. That would address what measures will be taken to prevent loss time and deficiencies that have not occurred as of yet.
Without that, an should there continue to be frequent maintenance windows and more then 1% down time, I am not sure that I can continue with SM come renewal. That is just a shame.
www.RobArtPhoto.com
Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans
www.RobArtPhoto.com
Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. -Walker Evans
April Fools!
My site is fine, all my pictures are there!
The weird thing about the checksum error I have, it says that xxxxxxx is not matching xxxxxxxx, but it is the exact same checksum, so it's probably more a programming error than a real checksum error.
i still gett some errors but it usaullay works on the second auto retry
i havn't tried LR2 plugin yet
Cameras: D300S w/MB-D10 grip
Primes: 35mm F1.8 AFS| 50mm F1.8D | 300mm F2.8 AFS I
Teles/flash: TC17E II | SB400
www.turbov6camaro.com 1997 3800 II V6 Camaro
11.23 1/4 mile 20psi