SmugMug CEO says Amazon’s S3 saves — big

by on April 27, 2007

SmugMug’s CEO (Don MacAskill) says Amazon’s S3 saved his firm more than half a million dollars so far.

Don also does some great CEO blogging where he takes on whether or not Flickr is better.

Speaking of photos, come on along to Photowalking on Sunday. Half Moon Bay Airport. I’ll be at the front gate at 9 a.m. The weather is going to be awesome.

I found both of these links by reading feeds for my link blog. Read that and learn about the guy who couldn’t get into the US because of a Google search. Scary.

  • Yup, the lead tech from SmugMug extolled S3 big time at web 2.0 Expo, scalable, cheap, leveraging a mega-infrastructure. I'm sold.
  • Hey Robert,

    That "Show me the Money" post was made back in November. Things have gotten even better since then. It's now been a full 12 months, and I've saved almost exactly $1M using S3 in that time. $700K in real true savings, and another $300K in taxes that I didn't have to pay (but would eventually get back). $1M that didn't leave SmugMug's bank account.

    Check out my ETech slides for the latest numbers. Guess I'd better post a follow-up entry with updated stats. :)

    Slides: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/files/ETech-SmugMu...
  • Heh, Don, I missed the date on those posts. I saw them on the YCombinator blog and thought they were great.
  • @Robert:

    Now, now... don't tell me you're not a regular reader of my feed! :)

    For people who *have* worked in datacenters, unlike yourself (you outed yourself today, didn't you?), today's post is particularly useful. Those YouTube boys were mindblowingly smart at the MySQL conference yesterday.

    Hoping it makes digg's front page but the upcoming Hardware section is like a ghost town. Apparently I suck at optimizing for digg. :)
  • I am, but I read feeds in river of news, not feed-by-feed so didn't catch that this isn't a new one of yours.
  • Wanderley
    I wonder how long Amazon can keep those prices down, though. They aren't making money on S3 or EC2 right now, and the economy of scale is pretty much there already. Making it even bigger probably won't make it cheaper for them at this point.

    But it's a great idea, isn't it? However, I agree with everyone that thinks other players will flood that market with offers pretty soon. You wouldn't believe how simple it is to set up Linux virtual machines once you have the network and data centers in place. Google could do that overnight if they chose to.

    Also, History has proven that first movers advantage doesn't work well against Microsoft, even if one can't see Windows as a virtual machine friendly OS right now. Amazon can always hope that Microsoft will screw up (boy, wouldn't that be sweet revenge for Brian Valentine?), but it's wise to respect them.

    I hope Amazon continues to succeed. I love it that they are not control freaks: Bezos and company really get a kick out of watching the very creative ways people will use their infrastructure. And, in a zen kind of way, Bezos will be there with his hat to catch any money that decides to fall from the sky as a result.
  • michael
    It will be interesting to see what impact the newly revised S3 bandwidth pricing scheme has on the bottom line for SmugMug.
  • Mark
    Cabel from Panic, a indie Mac software company, released their latest application, Coda, last week. He mentioned that they received 643GB of traffic in seven days that was offloaded to Amazon S3 for the cheap price of $128.

    http://www.cabel.name/2007/04/coda-one-week-lat...

    Thought it was pretty interesting. Maybe not as large as SmugMug, but it's nice to see how S3 is helping the smaller people.
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