royans

Smugmug.com , a 5 year old company with just 23 employees has 315000 paying customers and 195 million photographs. CEO & "Chief Geek" Don MacAskill has a nice set of slides where he talks about its 5 year journey during which it went from small startup to a profitable business. The talk was given during Amazon's "Startup project" so it talks mostly about how it uses AWS (Amazon Web services). Other than wonderful fun loving employees who are also "super heroes" in his eyes, he talks about the how they are doubling the storage requirements on an yearly basis. They already have about 300 TB in use, and as of today all of that is on Amazon's S3. Don estimates that based on his estimates, for the storage they are using, they are saving about 500K per year which is pretty big for a small operation like theirs. The Smugmug architecture has evolved over time. Internally it can serve images in 3 different ways. It could either "proxy" th