How does SmugMug scale to serious professional use?

Question

The SmugMug feature page lists one of the features available across all accounts as "Unlimited photo uploads" and "Unlimited traffic".

I hear terms used like this today and am weary of what that actually means. For example, unlimited data usage on many cellphone plans that are listed as unlimited, are in the fine print- not actually unlimited.

Do serious professionals with very high traffic rates and or a very vast collection exist? If so do they have to pay more? This is all meant to focus on a single question(as stated in the title, I am simply suggesting supporting topics that would enforce that answer).

Answer 1

Two folks come to mind that I know have vast collections of images on SmugMug.

The first is Trey Ratcliff who uses SmugMug as the photo host for his popular Stuck in Customs blog. In the screenshot on a blog post here, he notes having over 175,000 photo views in one day.

The second is Thomas Hawk, who just announced he's offering photos for sale via SmugMug. While I don't know his traffic numbers, his announcement indicates he's uploaded "about 5,000 images".

I would say based on these two anecdotes, SmugMug scales just fine.

Answer 2

I'll quote SmugMug CEO/Chief Geek, Don MacAskill here:

"There was one memorable time when a customer asked us to store more than 2TB of his photos back in 2005. We say 'unlimited' and we mean it, so despite costing ~$20K for just this one customer, this was my reply: http://smu.gs/pZLoFl"

So granted that info is from 2005. Now almost the entirety of SmugMug's infrastructure resides on Amazon Web Services so SmugMug can pretty much scale on a whim and by "whim" I mean automatically with their automated systems they affectionately refer to as SkyNet.

Answer 3

I know for an absolute fact that there are users with Terabytes of data, that they do not charge any more than a normal user would pay. They don't even force them to be pro users.

However, I know in the past that there have been bandwidth limits, that have been high. They only applied to photo downloads, not HTML code or even self downloads. It looks like they no longer do that.

However, it should be noted that the smugmug terms and conditions are designed to stop people from, say, using Smugmug as a back end for a non-photo related site.

Bottom line, if you are a photographer or a small group of photographers, even if you have a huge collection and drive lots of traffic, you should be fine.

Answer 4

I wrote a blog post about the capacity of SmugMug in October of 2009. In a nutshell, Vincent LaForet‘s Canon Mark IV vid on SmugMug used over 20 terabytes of bandwidth for 300,000 views in 14 hours according to Baldy. I have no reason to doubt those numbers. It is about the equivalent of them delivering the text of the Library of Congress in fourteen hours.

Answer 5

Beware too much stuff.

Unless you are trying to be a Stock Photo agency like Corbis, I think the number of photos on offer should be limited. Remember slide shows of the family vacation that droned on for hours, leaving everyone asleep but the presenter? I heard a personal portfolio should be only 12-15 images. Not thousands. Not even hundreds, but your mileage may vary.