SymbioStock – change of hosting provider to gain more sales
Perhaps this is a hopeful title! However, I became very disillusioned with the performance of my personal stock agency site (BackyardStockPhotos.com) over recent weeks with its hosting at BlueHost. I track the response time of the site using Pingdom. This site sends a page load request every 5 minutes and graphs the results. As you can see, there have been some good times, but some horrendous page load times as well:
Page Load times
6 seconds is a long time to wait for an image to appear, and when it gets to 12, I can imagine that anyone searching for a particular image, or just waiting for the license page to come up, would give up and go elsewhere. As I’ve decided to really make my own site a profitable venture, I decided to invest in some proper hosting arrangements and move away from the low cost general hosting that BlueHost provides to professional hosting from a local (to me) company called ServInt. I’ve known some of the executives of this company since the late 1990s and they are still running the show – which gives you a good idea of how long it has been in business. I found the pre-sales discussions to be very helpful. They happily talked to me for an hour or more about different sorts of hosting, and I decided to go with their VPS product – a virtual server environment with all the resources assigned to me. I can add my other websites to this server in future, but for now it just hosts my Stock Photo agency. Their technical team handled the complete migration of my site from BlueHost, and responded to all the various teething issues very quickly and competently – I consistently got the feeling that the Operations team are themselves highly skilled engineers, and regardless of the time of day or night, they picked up where the previous engineer had got to, and fixed the next issue for me. As you can see from the graph, I am now in the 2-3 second load time. The downside – Bluehost was $4.99 a month, ServInt is $49.95 a month although a 10% discount for signing up for a year reduced that total.
Will it translate to sales – I’ve focused first on getting my images online – I’m now up at 1720 or so – and the recent changes in the Symbio software to allow a much smoother purchase without registration should help as well. As the community grows (now at 165,000 images), I’m hoping the networking effect will also help!
Watch this space!
I’m also thinking to sell my photos with SymbioStock but I doubt about results I can get, because is difficult to get a lot of traffic because there is a lot of competition.
I heard that some sites are making $20/month.
Do you have better results with BackyardStockPhotos.com website ?
Hi Jeff
Tricky question. Speaking for myself, I have sold 4 images via my site but I asked someone who contacted me about some cat images to buy them there. A real buyer also tried to buy a file but this site failed them (before I moved) and so they went away. I’ve been very unhappy about the performance of the site under the cheap hosting deals – I am sure that people would give up, and so I am going to give it 12 months to prove its worth. I’m putting more images there, more that are only on my own site and Alamy, and I hope to see some positive results.
So, the jury is still out for me!
Steve
Thanks Steve.
Your new hosting is very expensive for 100 GB space, 2Gb Ram and no dedicated microprocesors.
I have also search in the past for a better hosting and the best offer I have found is : http://www.serverloft.com/rootservers/rootservers-compare.phpI
I get 2000GB space, 24GB RAM and 4 dedicated microprocesors for $44.
I hope this info will help you to save some money in the future.
Jeff
The link is: http://www.serverloft.com/rootservers/rootservers-compare.php
Thanks Jeff – I did pay a bit less because of the annual agreement, but I went for this company more for the very experienced support team, which took me through the transition of the site very smoothly. That, in the short term, was more important. At the end of the day, it depends on the sales to see if it is worthwhile!
Steve