Power outage at Rackspace
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.
Syncplicity Pricing
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:
- A trial isn’t enough. There needs to be a free version.
- Many of you felt you don’t have enough data to take advantage of an unlimited plan.
- 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
Blog E-mail subscription
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
Press Coverage
Syncplicity has been getting a lot of great press coverage lately. You may have run across these articles, but I’ll be the first to admit that you’d be hard-pressed to find any of these reviews through our website. We’re working on updating our website, but in the meantime I’ll post new reviews here. While we’re still in the process of hunting down all Syncplicity reviews, here are a few from the past week that I’ve run across:
Hear it here first — literally. The Power of Information radio talk show recently covered Syncplicity. You can listen to the full show by clicking here. Fast-forward to 17:07 to hear just the Syncplicity specific bits. You can also listen to it on the radio. Times are available on their site.
VUNet’s blog, Download Junkies did a comparison of Syncplicity and SugarSync, concluding: “We have both a SugarSync and Syncplicity account and prefer the design of Syncplicity.”
MakeUseOf recently covered Syncplicity as in an article with a great title, “A Tryst with Syncplicity”. I didn’t entirely get their Cheer/Boo system though.
Austrailian magazine, PC Authority honored Syncplicity with their highest rating, 5 out of 5 stars.
I’m excited to see such great reviews, especially since we’re still in beta!
Leonard
Welcome!
On behalf of the Syncplicity team, welcome to the Syncplicity blog!
We will be posting the latest and greatest news, useful tips and tricks, and some of our thoughts so you can see some of our thinking as Syncplicity grows and moves out of beta.
Along with myself, Syncplicity’s other co-founders, Ondrej and Isaac, will be posting on here as well. They’ll be introducing themselves shortly.
We have some topics lined up over the next few weeks, but if you have any questions or topics you’re interested in, post up a message in the Syncplicity Forums. We’ll be taking interesting questions and hot topics from the forums and covering them in more detail here.
I’m very excited about this new blog. It’s my hope that you’ll find this informative and have as much fun reading it as we have writing it!
Leonard Chung – CEO