Irish technology blogger Damien Mulley has organised an interesting initiative called the Tuesday Push. The idea being to put the spotlight on cool startups and services in a co-ordinated fashion.
This week’s “target” is photo sharing site Pix.ie which just happens to be a client of ours.
So what do they do exactly?
In their own words:
Pixie is Ireland’s new online photo sharing community! We provide you with a safe place to upload, share and permanently store your photos online.
The system is quite easy to use and comes with a lot of “social” features so that you can easily connect to other users and share photos with them.
Since the entire thing is hosted in Ireland the connection speed for Irish and European users is fantastic (not that we’d know anything about that *cough*).
What gives pix.ie an edge over Flickr in many respects is that a lot of the more “advanced” features are bundled in at no extra cost, though I assume that their longer term strategy would involve some charges for “premium” features.
About the Author: Michele Neylon
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Many thanks guys!
Interesting that you bring up the connection speed :).
This is most certainly one of the great selling points of favouring Pixie over the competition if you are accessing us from this part of the world.
It is also, one of the most misunderstood areas which we continuously have to explain:
Most people only consider observed “upload speed” when they think about whether or not we are faster than Flickr. We are WAY faster than Flick, but not for upload and I’ll explain why that is below…
The advantage we have by partnering with Blacknight to provide our IP transit infrastructure is the incredible low latency that you guys can offer us. I’m quite sure you could explain this better than I, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on anything, but low latency only delivers big advantages when fetching lots of small files in quick successful of each other (like pages full of photo thumbnails). Test the latency for yourself:
>ping pix.ie
Pinging pix.ie [78.153.223.10] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 78.153.223.10: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=123
Reply from 78.153.223.10: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=123
vs.
>ping flickr.com
Pinging flickr.com [68.142.214.24] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 68.142.214.24: bytes=32 time=132ms TTL=54
Reply from 68.142.214.24: bytes=32 time=131ms TTL=54
That’s nearly 10x faster…
Uploading on the other hand is sending large amounts of data (the full size photo) over an already slow connection (typically 10x slower than your download speed) and in this case the latency differential will become insignificant and you end up just waiting for data transfer.
We get users uploading from Japan and China (I’m sure you’ve seen the traffic spikes on your network… we have) and they are getting 40-50Mbps upload! When will our broadband providers get with the 21st century!
So why do I get DUPs when pinging pix.ie, e.g.:
PING pix.ie (78.153.223.10) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from pix.ie (78.153.223.10): icmp_seq=1 ttl=121 time=39.0 ms
64 bytes from pix.ie (78.153.223.10): icmp_seq=1 ttl=121 time=40.0 ms (DUP!)
64 bytes from pix.ie (78.153.223.10): icmp_seq=2 ttl=121 time=41.8 ms
64 bytes from pix.ie (78.153.223.10): icmp_seq=2 ttl=121 time=41.8 ms (DUP!)
Marcus
As you’re using us for transit the connection speed was bound to come into the equation 🙂
Michele
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