Smugmug bandwidth limit

nathan

I've played a little with my trial smugmug account and I like the features it offers, however, I have to wonder why they have such a low download limit. I'm comparing this to a Mac.com account where the standard bandwidth limit is 16GB and 25GB for an upgraded account, while smugmug's limits are 4, 8, and 16GB for standard, power, and pro. For a service geared toward sharing photographs, these limits just feel a little low.

Along those lines, I can't find anywhere that smugmug lists the costs for buying extra bandwidth once you've hit the monthly limit. Is this price listed anywhere, or does anyone know what it is?

Andy

hi nathan,

actually it's quite rare for a user to go over their bandwidth allocations. in the extreme case when it's happened, smugmug has always worked with the folks it's happened to (say you get a celebrity photo, and it makes the rounds!)....bumping up the bandwidth for these rare occasions. if you were a standard user, and this happened with frequency, we'd recommend upgrading to a power account.

so, in our experience, it's rarely been an issue.

it's further explained here and that's also where the answer to your last question is...

hope this helps,

nathan

Thanks for the answers Andy.

It may be that smugmug is not the best solution for what I wanted to do, which is to put up lots of shots (not heavily non-culled) for my family to browse and download. I see how it would work great for presenting a gallery of my best and favorite shots.

Andy

nathan wrote:

Thanks for the answers Andy.

It may be that smugmug is not the best solution for what I wanted to do, which is to put up lots of shots (not heavily non-culled) for my family to browse and download. I see how it would work great for presenting a gallery of my best and favorite shots.

interesting - the way i started with smugmug was to put up over 5000 family photos that i collected from 50 members of the family - and created a 100-year family archives of photographs. even with this heavy usage, i never hit bandwidth limits from this type of sharing....

i encourage you to give it a try, what you want to do right in the sweetspot

jfriend

You'd be surprised how little bandwidth gets used

nathan wrote:

Thanks for the answers Andy.

It may be that smugmug is not the best solution for what I wanted to do, which is to put up lots of shots (not heavily non-culled) for my family to browse and download. I see how it would work great for presenting a gallery of my best and favorite shots.

You would be surprised how little bandwidth gets used. Because smugmug automatically makes smaller versions of your images for you and those are what is presented on the web for browser performance reasons, bandwidth usage is generally quite small.

I use my site for several different things. One of the uses is exactly as you describe, uploading lots of family photos for the family to view and download. I also use my site for event photography (taking pictures of school events, soccer teams, boy scout trips, etc...) and I share those pictures with large numbers of parents. The only time I ever ran up a decent bandwidth usage was after I posted 1400 pictures of the school talent show and then announced to all the school parents that the pictures (including originals for download) were on the web for viewing or download. Even then, I only hit around 6GB that month, though I had thousands of visits. The only thing that ends up taking up any real bandwidth (other than a hit commercial or political site) is downloads of originals. If your average JPEG quality 10 original is around 1MB, then you'd get nearly 4000 downloads/month in a 4MB plan and for a small amount of extra money, you can get the 8MB plan. It's hard to get to the limit.

For reference, I have over 6000 photos taking more than 14GB, many of them photos from the events I shoot.