August 2019 Newsletter

[Dallas]

Lilys by The Swede (seen here)

Recently I was advised by SparkPost (the company that has been providing SMTP email services for Fotozones) that they wouldn’t be willing to continue their service to non paying clients such as ourselves. Basically our only option was to either opt in to their somewhat expensive plan or find another means of delivering our system emails. 

 

Thanks to Fotozones member Clactonian I was alerted to the services of Mailgun who I have now successfully integrated into the Fotozones email system. If you got this email it is working! Their system, while not offering quite as many emails as the previous provider on the free level, should see us through for now. 

This brings me the gist of this email. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that free software or independent online services are gradually dying out (or being forced out of the online space, to be less diplomatic about it). Just a couple of months ago cPanel, who are one of the most prolific providers of server management software, announced a complete change to the way they license their product. Instead of buying one license for an entire server that could be used on any number of accounts on that server, they now require a license for each account on the server and sell these in batches of 100. If you are on a small reseller server like ours, this has huge implications.

 

For our host it represented a massive increase in their software costs of about 400%, which they have tried to minimise but ultimately had no option but to pass on to their customers. In my case this wrung out to about a 35% increase in the monthly hosting costs. I have reduced that to a 10% increase but I had to sacrifice around 25% of my available disk space to keep the costs manageable. 

 

In real terms this means that if you are using Fotozones to post your images to the community, I am going to have to restrict the available storage space to non-subscribing members quite significantly. I’ll decide on this in the next few days. 

 

While it is very difficult to try and grow an independent online community in the current climate, I am not giving up. I have begun a new section of Fotozones called the Angle Of View (AOV) in which I am producing content for subscribing members only. This section will contain writings on a personal level of how I work in the photographic field professionally, as well as my thoughts on various other related things. It’s kind of like a non-public blog that I hope will be useful to FZ readers. I am aiming to write to it at least once a week. There are already two sizeable pieces of over 2000 words each already in there. 

 

Subscribing members will also get other benefits which are fully described here. For $5 a month you will be helping Fotozones stay alive in the current climate as well as helping to thumb your nose at the likes of Facebook (who are still trying feverishly to corner the entire internet discussion market). 

 

Please give it some thought. 

 

Dallas
 

[vivionm]

This is bad news. And unfortunate.

I will not  be paying a monthly fee. From what I have seen so far, I can live without the AOV content.

[Dallas]

You won't need to pay as I am honouring all Life Memberships, as I promised to do when they were introduced many years ago. 

 

Those who don't have Life memberships or Subscriptions can gain access to what I am offering by contributing articles or joining a Fotozones safari. 

[vivionm]

Ah. Thanks for that, which I had not understood.