Time to move to another platform?

Admin's and Mod's Admin's and Mod's - War Room
#1

Hi,

Some of you may have noticed that somebody uploaded a malicious script last Friday (warnings on some pages) and just to be sure to get rid of it entirely I decided to restore from a backup which was 12 hours old. Unfortunately that meant we had some downtime and lost a few images (around 5). This has got me thinking. I’m wondering if it is time to move to a different platform. We’re currently using 75GB of space, but that could be much more if the script were to store larger images and also videos.
I’d like to have your feedback as moving to a different platform could offer quite a few advantages. Right now I’m thinking flickr ($50/year) or 500px ($75/year).

Advantages I can think of:
-more uploads and comments since a lot of other users are already on flickr/500px
-easier feeds for other websites which would translate to more traffic for ww2incolor.com
-more secure
-more robust & scalable platform which is proven to work with millions of images
-always updated with new features
-social media
-most likely cheaper (probably won’t need the current $330/month dedicated server anymore, but something like $200/month)
-faster site as it’s based on newer technology like jquery & html5
-most likely more responsive design (ie. can easily browse site on different devices)
-maybe phone apps

Disadvantages I can think of:
-potential flickr/500px downtimes (not saying that they are more frequent, but if their service goes down then we would be down as well)
-less customizable
-IF (big if) we reach the 1TB limit it’s $500/year at flickr but that’s still cheaper than the current server setup

#2

Too technical for me.

I’d support whatever you think is best.

#3

Ditto. I’ve never owned a forum, so it’s hard to say…

#4

I’ll do more research, but it seems to be a logical step if we want to grow this website.
The big problem I see is importing all the info from this system to the new system. 31000+ images with titles, descriptions & comments (I don’t want to lose comments, but if we did it wouldn’t be the end of the world).

So far I’ve found:
zenfolio
500px
smugmug
flickr

#5

Does one of these offer a good security package in the deal, maybe that would handle patching etc. automatically, it would take some of the pressure off you having to play the measure, counter measure game.

#6

The advantage of using one of the four is that everything is hosted by them, so it is to their benefit to keep their system secure or else thousands of other clients would be affected.

#7

The idea that Flickr is already in use by many of those who upload would be of benefit to the site, and not being at all savvy in I.T. I’ll have to limit this to the use of whichever service offers the most seamless experience possible for the users. Simpler is gooder.

#8

500px is off the table. They banned my account for no reason (unbanned it later), but that’s not something I’d like to experience again considering I didn’t get an email with a reason and also no warning.