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A comment on The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your help. Parent comment

Re:The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your... by ignoramous on Friday December 20, 2019 @01:56PM (#21846518)
> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.

SmugMug did it primarily to improve stability and performance. They point out that Flickr hosts tens of billions of photos with 100M registered users and hundreds of thousands of paying customers across the globe. I see the need to use AWS (or any cloud provider for that matter) as a necessity to run a paid web service cost effectively at this scale.

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Re:The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your... by ivoras on Friday December 20, 2019 @02:02PM (#21846564)
It's a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem, but not really. They still needed a solid business plan how to earn money from Flickr before moving to AWS (or any other expensive global cloud) - this kind of looks like they've thought of asking for money AFTER the move.

Hope the 30% increase in performance was worth it...

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Re:The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your... by ignoramous on Friday December 20, 2019 @02:39PM (#21846782)
> They still needed a solid business plan how to earn money from Flickr...

SmugMug, by their own admission, bought Flickr to help keep it alive. Currently, they're not even looking to make money but reduce the operating costs. I'm sure they didn't take the decision to move to AWS lightly, at all.

> ...this kind of looks like they've thought of asking for money AFTER the move.

May be you're right that it might have been a mistake, but the fact that SmugMug are a heavy AWS user means it might have made a lot of sense to leverage not only the engineering and operational expertise but also the heavily discounted rates they must have negotiated with AWS?

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Re:The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your... by toomuchtodo on Friday December 20, 2019 @03:52PM (#21847293)
Bandwidth and storage is likely still killing them. Should've put it in Backblaze B2 and paid Cloudflare for CDN.
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Re:The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your... by qes on Saturday December 21, 2019 @02:20PM (#21852832)
Would probably cut their image hosting costs like 70%, maybe more even.
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Re:The world’s most-beloved money-losing business needs your... by ahartmetz on Friday December 20, 2019 @07:16PM (#21848594)
That's like saying "if a car manufacturer is really large, the only way to make it work is to outsource its car manufacturing". I guess so, if they forgot how their core business works. Seems like Flickr forgot how to website.
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