Speed becoming a real issue (UK)

ukaskew

As much as I really hate to say this, I'm struggling to justify even the relatively low price of Smugmug these days. I love the layout, the features and the ease of use but the speed is becoming a serious problem.

It's been particuarly bad recently but I seem to struggle with access quite often anyway, it frequently times out at work and on slower connections (especially when using the search function), and even at home it becomes painfully slow just moving between medium sized pictures. I also feel like every time I've uploaded in the past month or so that there has been a problem, usually with images failing to even reach the upload log screen for a considerable time. I know it's not specific to my home as many people who visit my galleries have problems too.

I'm not bringing all this up to have a go at the staff or anything as I know the customer support is excellent, however it is pretty much impossible to sell the idea of SmugMug to people (or even justify why I use it) when it seems whenever I show people my galleries it grinds to a halt sooner rather than later.

I'm not sure if this is a UK specific issue (I know it certainly is a UK issue, as I bumped into a fellow UK user at a motor-racing event recently and they summed it up perfectly; "it's very slow...but it is cheap".) but as a useable tool it is becoming increasngly difficult to justify, which is a real shame as I love just about every other aspect of the site.

Chris.
www.chrisharrison.smugmug.com

Andy

ukaskew wrote:

As much as I really hate to say this, I'm struggling to justify even the relatively low price of Smugmug these days. I love the layout, the features and the ease of use but the speed is becoming a serious problem.

It's been particuarly bad recently but I seem to struggle with access quite often anyway, it frequently times out at work and on slower connections (especially when using the search function), and even at home it becomes painfully slow just moving between medium sized pictures. I also feel like every time I've uploaded in the past month or so that there has been a problem, usually with images failing to even reach the upload log screen for a considerable time. I know it's not specific to my home as many people who visit my galleries have problems too.

I'm not bringing all this up to have a go at the staff or anything as I know the customer support is excellent, however it is pretty much impossible to sell the idea of SmugMug to people (or even justify why I use it) when it seems whenever I show people my galleries it grinds to a halt sooner rather than later.

I'm not sure if this is a UK specific issue (I know it certainly is a UK issue, as I bumped into a fellow UK user at a motor-racing event recently and they summed it up perfectly; "it's very slow...but it is cheap".) but as a useable tool it is becoming increasngly difficult to justify, which is a real shame as I love just about every other aspect of the site.

Chris.
www.chrisharrison.smugmug.com

Indeed, we've been hearing this from a few other UK Smuggers. And we'd like to improve it. Sometimes we can affect things, sometimes things are out of our control. Can you get to London? Give it straight to (and hear straight from) our Director of Operations, Andrew Gibbons - at, "SmugMug at the Pub" :
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=40317

Thanks for posting, and telling exactly how you feel. We really appreciate it.