Shaken Confidence in Web Based Galleries

I have written several articles on this blog, encouraging people to consider the use of web based photo galleries as a means of displaying their work to the world, providing any BODY at any TIME with instant access to their work for a wide variety of reasons.

Potential customers get to see what you can do before giving you work. Clients get quick and convenient access to proofs. Family, living long distances away, can see the progress of children and grandchildren. Friends and relatives get to see pictures of family celebrations and one's adventures on vacation. Fellow photographer hobbiests get to admire one another's work, learn from one another and ENCOURAGE each other.

Potentially the greatest benefit of web-based galleries is that your images are stored remotely from your home and are thief proof, fire proof, flood proof and (theoretically) digital crash proof.

It seems I spoke too soon.

The recent near disaster over at Pbase.com has shaken my confidence somewhat and I am having to revise my thinking with regard to the security advantages of web galleries. Pbase.com stores and provides access to hundreds of millions of images - belonging to hundreds of thousands of photographers across the globe. Just how safe ARE these images?

For those who are not aware, the published story goes as follows. A large datacentre in North Carolina, where the server and data storage for Pbase is kept, suffered a major power outage on September 24. The resident UPS devices became exhausted before power could be restored and the site simply went down in disorder. Upon the restoration of power, the server failed to come up correctly and several days of frantic activity were necessary before parts of the site could be revived at all. It appears that it had become necessary to install an entirely new server and port across the ENTIRE database of images, gallery formatting, management software etc to new hard drive banks.

The result is that (as of yesterday - October 11) not everything was working correctly. Evidently, some data HAS been lost, not every subscriber's galleries HAVE been satisfactorily restored to their previous state, forums are NOT working and the all important statistics system (possibly the most comprehensive on the web), reporting daily activity and hit counts to individual subscribers - is STILL down.

All of this has been discussed at length on various web forums and a lot of people are unable to understand how such a major website can simply collapse like this given the theoretically foolproof redundancy and off-site back up systems which are in such widespread use today.

A number of questions come to mind:

a) Could my thousands of images on Pbase have been entirely lost?
b) Just how vulnerable are such systems to power outages, system failure, computer viruses and systematic cyber attacks?
c) Is the business model for such web gallery systems viable? Does it really allow for the kind of bulletproof security which we have come to anticipate?

Now let's get some things crystal clear. I think the guys who conceived, designed and implemented Pbase have created a wonderful thing. Aside from the happenings back on September 24, I have had nothing but GOOD experiences with Pbase. I have no evidence that the people in charge at Pbase are trying to do anything OTHER than what they believe to be in the best interests of their subscribers.

Having said that, my confidence in the Pbase system has taken a severe hit. Given that I sometimes use my galleries for professional purposes, I can't really afford to have my display site down. Consequently I have opened another set of galleries at Smugmug. i.e.
http://www.hobbsie.smugmug.com

Let me voice some personal impressions concerning Pbase and Smugmug.

To my mind, the Smugmug software is smoother, faster, more presentable and more flexible than the Pbase equivalent. What is more, I believe that my pictures and the display pages simply look BETTER at Smugmug.

On the other hand, the stats routines at Pbase (WHEN they are in operation) provide fantastic feedback to subscribers. As a Pbase supporter, you are told how often people look at your pictures along with which individual PAGES and IMAGES they look at. The communications system between supporters is EQUALLY brilliant, along with the simply SUPERB "Photo-a-Day" setup which shows EVERY new PaD image to EVERYONE. At Pbase you feel "connected" to a global network of like minded "fellows" in a way which simply ISN'T as true at Smugmug (or anywhere ELSE to my knowledge).

I await future developments in the Web gallery industry with great interest.

PS In the interests of accuracy, I note that the Pbase forums are now back up - 18 days after the power outage. I notice ON the forums that quite a number of Pbase supporters have done just as I had done - start up galleries on Smugmug. It was with some interest that I note the establishment of a "Pbase Refugees" community at Smugmug. Pbase statistics routines are still down.