Photos are available again

If you tried to use the photo archive over the weekend you would have been disappointed.

My Parish Walk photo collection which contains thousands of photos, like the rest of my photos, is hosted by fotopic.net.

The fotopic site went down on Friday and was only available again mid morning today. I joined a user forum when I became aware of the problem yesterday and kept track with the rumours and a few facts.

Like so many things in life, you don't realise how much you rely on something until it goes missing. There were stories about the company having gone under which thankfully proved to be untrue - it was only a technical problem.

I pay £45 a year to fotopic to provide a part of the service to users of manxathletics.com and parishwalk.com although I also get benefits from the site for family and other social events. Unlike the free service, you can have more than one gallery (I have used 25 of my 100) and there are all sorts of other benefits. I registered for three different alternative sites yesterday but I have to say that none of them were a patch on fotopic, at least not unless I was prepared to pay hundreds of pounds a year.

I am going to consider a project that I have had on the shelf for a while and that is to host the photos directly from the manxathletics.com server but it may be a case of putting all eggs in one basket.

As I mentioned previously, the manxathletics.com and the parishwalk.com sites are hosted by different providers and together with the forum, photos and videos being in different places it does help to spread the risk of failure.

Here is the statement from the fotopic owners

STATEMENT FROM SNAPPY DESIGNS LTD, 5TH JANUARY 2009Dear Fotopic User,On Friday 2nd January 2008 photo sharing site Fotopic.net suffered a core equipment failure while upgrading the server and network capacity. As a result of this the Fotopic.net website was unavailable from approximately 9am on Friday 2nd January.Despite our best efforts to resolve the situation the gallery service remained unavailable until approximately 10:30am on Monday 5th January 2008.As a result of this outage we are examining our hosting capability and contingency plans, but wish to assure customers that Fotopic.net has not ceased trading and will be enhancing its services during 2009. No data or images have been lost during this time and all systems are back to normal.Additionally we will be extending Plus and Premium subscriptions by an extra 2 weeks as a goodwill gesture.We apologise for the situation which was ultimately out of our control, and would like to thank customers for bearing with us.Best regards,The DirectorsSnappy Designs Ltd trading as Fotopic.net