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.