Syncplicity Blog

At 5 PM PDT on Tuesday, September 23rd, Syncplicity will be performing a major scheduled upgrade.  Given the size and complexity of the change, we expect the transition to take about seven hours. During this time, your computer will be unable to synchronize with Syncplicity and my.syncplicity.com will be unavailable.  www.syncplicity.com and blog.syncplicity.com will continue to be available.

You can leave your client running during this time — it will automatically reconnect and resume synchronizing when we are back up.  And of course, your data and account information will be kept safe & secure throughout the process.

Our team will be working throughout the night until this migration is complete — we will be twittering updates (http://twitter.com/syncplicity) along the way.  Feel free to say hi if you’re online too.

For those of you wondering what we’re up to, here’s the scoop:

Behind the scenes, Syncplicity runs on some pretty serious hardware.  Part of my job is to keep it running smoothly and plan for future growth.

The Syncplicity servers handle millions of requests every day.  During the past few months, Syncplicity has been growing quickly and our servers have been under an increasingly high load.  Even with several hardware upgrades, we’ve still had some brownouts during which some of you were unable to get the instant synchronization we built into the service.  Like you, we notice when our tray icon turns gray.

A month ago, we embarked on a plan to perform a major refresh of our infrastructure to eliminate these problems and ensure ample room to grow.  We’ve invested heavily in new servers and a new architecture that we’re finally ready to unveil.  Our server count is tripling. Individual servers will be more powerful.

For example, as part of the upgrade, all our database servers will be moving to quad-proc, quad-core servers.  Watching 16 cores in action is intense.  We’re also scaling out to increase redundancy and improve reliability and scalability.  This translates into a better experience for all users and as a small bonus, I know I’ll be sleeping better at night.

Thanks,
Isaac

VP of Technology

PC World has just published the results of its synchronization, backup, and sharing product shootout (available at PC World and published in the September ‘08 issue).

“With its breadth of features, ease of use, and added bonuses such as version control, Syncplicity is my top pick among sync services.” - Scott Dunn, PC World

Needless to say, we’re ecstatic that PC World has chosen Syncplicity as the number one choice over others in the area, especially against such established competitors!

We’ve always been huge believers in listening closely to users and delivering the best experience we could that everyone, from our moms to the geekiest of geeks, could use. It’s great to hear such strong validation from such a respected source. Time for some champagne!

Cheers!

Leonard, Ondrej, and Isaac

We’re honored! Lifehacker, “an award-winning, daily blog that features tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you get things done smarter and more efficiently”, is running its popular Hive Five feature series on File Synchronization tools this week and Syncplicity is in the Top 5!

Syncplicity made the list after a few days of “qualifiers” when Lifehacker readers had a chance to root for their favorite tool. Now anyone can vote for any of the five contenders in a real poll and we hope you vote for Syncplicity!

Read all about it and vote at http://lifehacker.com/398696/five-best-file-syncing-tools. If you end up voting for someone else, be sure to let us know why in the Forums - we care about your feedback more than anything else!

Thanks for voting!

The Syncplicity Team

Update @ 8pm PST: Everything is back up and the service is running normally. Send an e-mail to support@syncplicity.com if you’re running into any problems.

A cluster of servers hosted at Rackspace got knocked offline due to a power failure at Rackspace. Included in this cluster are the Syncplicity web servers as well as the main Syncplicity database servers. We’re waiting on Rackspace to stabilize our rack and are working with Rackspace right now to make sure everything comes back online normally. We’ll post updates as we hear them.

Last update from Rackspace:

July 9th 2008 — At approximately 5:00 P.M. CDT, our DFW data center experienced a brief loss of utility power that caused a transfer over to generator as designed. During this transition, some of the chillers did not start up correctly and temperatures within certain areas of the DC began to rise to the 90’s. The issue has been isolated and temperatures are decreasing steadily. We are investigating this issue and will provide future updates as they come available.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you or your customers.

Today, we’re excited to announce that all the files you’re backing up & sync’ing with Syncplicity are available from your iPhone!  We made an optimized version of our website just for our iPhone (and iPod Touch) users.  The website currently lets you view documents, photos, and hear your mp3s.

If you have an iPhone, here’s what you’ll see when you login and try to open the San Francisco Muni Map PDF:

To view the site, navigate to https://m.syncplicity.com on your iPhone.  The https://my.syncplicity.com site redirects if it detects you’re on an iPhone.  And, be sure to add it to your home screen for easier access by clicking the plus icon and clicking “Add to Home Screen”.

Let us know if you’re using it and how you’d like to see it extended.

Cheers,
Isaac

The Short Story (for those of you in a hurry)

Update: We haven’t forgotten about those of you in our beta! If you had a Syncplicity beta account as of June 30th and you choose to convert to a free account, it will have twice the normal space (4 GB). If you choose to convert to an Individual Subscription, it will have ten additional gigabytes of space for 50 GB total. New beta accounts without an invite code will have 2 GB for free accounts and 45 GB for Individual Subscriptions.

Many of you have been asking for final pricing and giving tons of great feedback on our initial pricing plans. We’ve been working hard to understand and incorporate your feedback. I’m happy to announce that we’ve finished crunching all of the numbers. Below is Syncplicity’s pricing and account types:

Free: Free forever. Allows up to two computers, 5 revisions per file or 30 days of previous revisions (whichever is less), up to 10,000 files, and 2 GB of storage. The free account expires after 60 days of inactivity.

Individual Subscription: $9.99 per month or $99 per year. Includes unlimited computers, unlimited file versions, unlimited number of files, and 40 GB of storage.

Additional Storage: $9.99 per month or $99 per year for 50 GB of storage. You can add this to your account as many times as you’d like to have even more storage.

An important part of Syncplicity’s growth has been through word of mouth and friends inviting friends. I’m happy to say Syncplicity now has a referral program as well where you can get additional storage bonuses added to your account for every new person that you refer to Syncplicity.

Full details are available here.

What Happened to Unlimited Storage?

Initially, we started with a plan to charge around $20 per month for unlimited storage. The value of Syncplicity is the experience it provides and the fact that it makes your files “active”, not the “passive” storage you can get by using a USB hard drive or an FTP site. Our aim with unlimited storage was to move the worry and cost away from storage in order to focus on the experience being delivered.

With your help, we’ve come up with pricing that allows for a free account and a monthly price as low as $8.25 while still providing enough storage that the basic plan covers the majority of users.

We got lots of feedback from across the Syncplicity community that really boiled down to three themes:

1. A trial isn’t enough. There needs to be a free version.
2. Many of you felt you don’t have enough data to take advantage of an unlimited plan.
3. There should be a lower initial price than $20 per month.

With these three pieces of feedback in mind, we went back to the drawing board to address it. While this new pricing may mean Syncplicity is more expensive for a few of you, for the vast majority of users, the price of Syncplicity is lower than before and we’re now able to offer free accounts.

We hope you like the new pricing. We worked hard to incorporate your feedback and we hope this new pricing addresses much of the comments you’ve given us!

Leonard

Updated: Click to read Picnik’s, Zoho’s, and Scribd’s blog entries about Syncplicity.

Announcing new products and features is always the most exciting time for all of us here at Syncplicity. That’s why today was especially fun. We got to launch something big! The big news? Syncplicity is now integrated with Zoho, Picnik, and Scribd in addition to Google Docs and Facebook.

From the very beginning, Syncplicity’s vision has always been to turn your data into something you never even have to think about. When you consider all the places you use it today, you’ll realize that getting it to where you need it, keeping it up-to-date in all the places you use it, and having constant access to it is no small feat. We live in a world that revolves around digital information; it was about time someone made dealing it with it as easy as it once used to be.

Why has dealing with data become so darn complicated anyway? The fact many of us now use multiple computers and devices on a daily basis certainly played a role in it. But that’s only one part of the picture. Even more significant is the rise of the web and its transition from a place where you primarily publish content to a place where you also create it. As the web becomes a serious companion to our desktops and we find ourselves creating and consuming content in both places, keeping it all in sync is a Herculean task.

That’s why we built Syncplicity and why today’s announcement is so exciting. With this release, Syncplicity lets you open and edit your files in any application you like - whether that application is installed on your desktop or lives in your web browser. There are no uploads and downloads to worry about, no additional places to keep your data in, and no out-of-date copies of your files lurking around the web. All your data is always in one place and always available on your computer, just as you’re used to.

While we designed the system to be open and extensible so any website can offer their services to you right on your desktop, we also picked and partnered with three industry leading web applications that you can start taking advantage of right away. They are:

Scribd, the best place to store, share, publish, and view your documents.

Zoho, the leading web-based office suite with an unparalleled feature set.

Picnik, the simplest to use, yet most powerful photo editing site on the web.

Here is how easy we made it: just right click on any supported document or photo, open the Syncplicity menu, and click Preview in Scribd iPaper, Edit in Zoho, or Edit in Picnik. Syncplicity will automatically open your chosen application in a web browser, load your document into it, and, when you’re done, sync any changes you make right back to your desktop. There are no accounts to create, no usernames and password to enter, and nothing to upload or download. Have I also mentioned it’s all free?

Both worlds - the offline world on your desktop and the online one in your web browser - have a lot to offer. With Syncplicity, there’s no need to move to one or the other exclusively. We’ll bridge them together for you so you can take the best from both.

Let us know what you think, what work and what doesn’t, and what other web applications you’d like to see integrated with Syncplicity. If you’re a company or a developer interested in becoming available to users on their desktops, get started at https://my.syncplicity.com/developers.

See you at the forums!
Ondrej

hello everyone! i wanted to introduce myself to the syncp community. i recently joined and i’m already right in the thick of it! since the first beta, i’ve been playing around with syncplicity and thought it was a really good product. leonard and i had met through a mutual friend of ours and quickly bonded over the trials of startup life. at the time, i had founded my own startup and was trying to get that off the ground. like many other people on the forums, i had been badgering him to develop a syncp mac client since most of my personal files are on macs.

when leonard decided they would make the mac client one of their highest priorities, i was inbetween things and he somehow convinced me that if i wanted a mac client, the quickest way possible would be if i wrote it myself. this will teach me never to ask for anything again :). i also discovered that isaac and ondrej were really awesome guys and also much smarter me, so it was an easy decision.

looking at the forums, i’m pleasantly surprised by the number of people who have given syncplicity such positive and useful feedback. i am really excited to have such quality users and will work hard to match the level of excellence the windows client has achieved. i will be contributing to the forums from now on. if you have a concern or idea for the mac client, feel free to drop me a line on the forums or directly at ian[at]syncplicity[dot]com.

-ian

We recently added the ability to get updates the Syncplicity blog via e-mail. You can now get the latest Syncplicity news through your web browser, your favorite RSS reader, or delivered straight to your e-mail inbox. It’s your choice.

You can use the links under Subscribe to enable the subscription of your choice.

Enjoy!

Leonard

We set up a FriendFeed group for Syncplicity over the weekend as a more informal venue to mention what’s on our minds and what we’ve got up our sleeves. Hope to see you there!