A new upload credit system and major performance upgrade.

For the past few weeks, we've been experiencing performance issues with Simplebucket and that is causing slow loading pages especially when browsing through the photos on our explore page.

Well, we've got good news! After a few nights of work, the performance of Simplebucket is finally getting to a state that I feel is acceptable. This performance boost will help a lot when photos get Digg'd or got on the front page of any of the popular social media sharing sites.

In other news, we've also rolled out software updates to Simplebucket last weekend. Here's the major changes if you haven't noticed:

1) If you are using the secret url to admin your photos, please go to the login page and request for your new url. Enter your email address and we'll send you the secret url. Why has my admin url changed, you might ask? Well, we have been having issues with the previous url format which contains the account's email address and after much debate, we felt that it is somewhat violating your privacy, especially if you are using someone else's computer to access your account. So to protect your privacy, we've made the url totally anonymous.



2) Every upload is now counted against your account's upload credits. ALL active account will get 5 upload credits per day. The other good news is, Simplebucket now allows unlimited storage for your account as long as you got enough credits to upload your photos. We previously have a 500 photo limit per account. So without doing anything, you will get 5x30 = 150 uploads/month. 5x365=1825 uploads/year. If that is not enough, we also offer upload credits for a very, very reasonable price of $0.02/upload credit. To buy more credits, go to your account options page once you have login or through your secret url page.

I think that's basically the 2 major changes in the current software release. Other minor changes includes bug fixes, performance upgrades and optimizing the code base so that things are flying faster. I hope to hear your comments on the new upload credit systems.

Thank you
Khang

Our first major downtime

Sorry, we are experiencing our first major downtime on a regular day ( other days like Digg'd days don't count ). Apparently, a power outage over at the datacenter where our server is sleeping is the cause. We will get Simplebucket up as soon as possible.

Simplebucket vs Seesmic

With Simplebucket getting a lot of traffic from Digg, I decided to take a look at what our Alexa's chart looks like. And true enough, you can see a huge bump on the Reach curve. But looking at Alexa's chart with Simplebucket alone is probably not very meaningful.

To make things more interesting, I decided to put Seemic into the mix and compare them against Simplebucket. Seemic is a "hot" startup the Mike Arrington of Techcrunch has been touting about.



The conclusion, Digg does wonders to your website's traffic but to maintain that level of traffic after the Digg effect is another challenge. However, my beliefs are we can do this together by making Simplebucket even better. We want to make Simplebucket the best damn photo hosting site and we can't do this without you, our USER! So if you love using Simplebucket, it's time to tell someone you know about us and help spread the love.

Got Digg'd and other updates

First of, if you had experienced difficulty visiting Simplebucket.com over the weekend, I'm sorry. This was not planned in any part by us and is also other known as the Digg Effect. So the story is, one of our users had wanted upload a screenshot of an email he got from Dominoes offering "Recession Deals" and posted his screenshot on Digg.com. This in turn got the Diggers going and after some 324 Diggs, it hit the main page of Digg on Saturday sending tons of visitors to Simplebucket.



The sudden surge in incoming requests brought our good old web server, Apache, into fits and he started to process stuff slower, and slower and finally, Apache could not take it anymore.




Well, at least, the lesson that I had taken away from this great event is - Never trust Apache's default configuration values. To make the long story short and avoiding all the technical gory details, I had to tweak certain Apache's configuration parameters and that finally give Apache a breather.

Putting that aside, I hope to announce some changes soon to Simplebucket. As many of you know, Simplebucket has been offering our FREE simple photo hosting for a while and in order to keep us going(*hint: it takes money to buy gas) so we will be tweaking Simplebucket a little bit just so we keep this great service up by getting some income to grow the site.

There will be a upcoming software release for Simplebucket.com where we will be putting in hot features that users has been requesting such as "albums", deleting photos that they do not want and a few bug fixes here and there. Overall, I promise, any change is for the good and if you love using Simplebucket and has something to say about Simplebucket, I would like to hear. Send me an email at support@simplebucket.com or better still, write about Simplebucket if you blog.

2000+ images and 700+ users and why you should use Simplebucket to host your images

Since our relaunch on March 20th, Simplebucket have been growing well in terms of users and images uploaded to Simplebucket. We've recently reached 700 users and 2000 uploads. With so many free image hosting sites out there, how do we stand out? Well for a number of good reasons:

1) All your images are hosted on Amazon S3.
Amazon S3 is a popular and scalable hosting platform web service. All uploads to Simplebucket are hosted at Amazon S3's infrastructure. I'm sure many of you know of Amazon.com and to run the biggest Ecommerce website in the world, they gotta have the one of the best web infrastructure in the world. Solsie.com, one of our active users, took advantage of our image hosting solution by using Simplebucket for hosting their images and that helps in a number of ways such as your blog/website will load much faster since the images tend to be the biggest assets normally and using Simplebucket means your images are served at much higher speed.

2) You get so many features and it's all free.
Yes, Simplebucket is not only free, you also get so many features that are premium features that you need to pay at our image hosting website. Things like adding voice recording, notes, stats and comments. Embed images with notes and voice. Simplebucket is the only image hosting site that does that.

3) Uploading without logging in.
I would have to say Simplebucket's unique upload process allows you to upload without having to register for an account. But that's not all. You also get to adminstrate your images even without an account. But if you are an account addict, no problem, we'll also let you convert from your secret url access to a password protected account.

So what are you waiting for? Go upload your photos to Simplebucket now.

Simplebucket partners Snapvine and adds voice to your photos

Simplebucket launches a new social media feature that allows users to add a voice recording to their photos hosted on Simplebucket.com. By partnering Snapvine and utilizing Snapvine's social media API, users can add voice to their photos by using a microphone or calling a toll free number.

Snapvine API press release

Here's a live demo:

Simplebucket explore photo screenshot

Simplebucket.com - Upload and Share Photos

Kobe's fake viral video

So Kobe's jump over an Aston Martin is getting big time on Digg's main page. So someone tried to prove the fake using Simplebucket to host the screenshot and use notes + voice to highlight the important details. We love how you are using Simplebucket.

This photo page is getting hit hard - 300+ views within minutes.
Update: almost 1000 views now

How to do a fake jump over Aston Martin

Simplebucket.com - Upload and Share Photos