Archive for July, 2008

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