Photo sharing is one of the hottest markets on the internet. Dozens of companies let customers create prints and photo gifts, place photos on social networking sites, and share their photos in custom online photo albums. With the popularity of these sites growing, site owners are faced with scaling problems as they work to meet ever-increasing storage and bandwidth requirements.

SmugMug is one of these companies. SmugMug is an independent, self-funded, profitable, and debt-free company with one programmer and only 15 employees. They are a subscription-based online photo sharing company with over 150,000 paying customers who depend on SmugMug to safely store more than 70 million photos on their behalf. This equates to an urgent need for reliable, highly-available storage.

To meet their storage needs without compromising affordability or top-level service, SmugMug turned to the Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is “storage for the internet” with a simple Web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web. Amazon designed Amazon S3 to make Web-scale computing easier for developers by giving them access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of websites.

As a rapidly growing business, data storage is SmugMug’s single largest expense. And as a smaller company overall, it has limited manpower and datacenter space. Amazon S3 allows SmugMug to compete with larger online photo service companies without having to invest in hardware, staff increases, or additional datacenter space.

Assuring its customers’ priceless photos are kept safe and accessible is a business imperative for SmugMug, so the company needed a storage solution that could provide real-time backup and failover systems. At the same time, it had to be cost-effective and able to scale with SmugMug’s growth. Given these needs, it was a simple decision to move to Amazon S3. After beta testing Amazon S3 and comparing it to internal costs for storage as well as other online storage alternatives, the choice was clear.

“We looked at Amazon S3’s pricing, design and ease-of-use and were blown away,” said Don MacAskill, SmugMug CEO. “Amazon designed the service so well—it’s simple and elegant, so much so that it was basically a drop-in addition to our current infrastructure. It’s an incredible improvement on everything else out there.”

It took SmugMug just one week from writing the first line of code to being fully operational on Amazon S3. The company copied over 80 terabytes of existing customer photos to Amazon S3, representing more than 70,000,000 original images and six display copies of each. SmugMug also backs up new photos to Amazon S3, resulting in an additional 10 terabytes of data added to Amazon S3 each month.

Before making the move to Amazon S3, SmugMug was depending on its own redundant storage and multiple datacenters, which soaked up a lot of capital. The company saved roughly $500,000 in planned disk drive expenditures in 2006 and cut its disk storage array costs in half.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to cost and performance, and Amazon S3 is the best on both accounts,” said MacAskill. “Our customers are comforted to know their photos are made safe by two companies and at least three datacenters in three states; and Amazon S3 has removed the worries around our limited staff numbers, room in our datacenter, and high storage costs. In short, Amazon S3 makes it possible for SmugMug to compete with huge, deep-pocket companies without having to raise massive amounts of cash for hardware.”

http://www.smugmug.com/