Hehe... if only it were so easy. Facebook was a joke back when they got their hundreds of millions in investment. That enabled them to actually make something of their "broken" site. Fortunately, they pulled it off and have something to talk about, even though they have been going about monetization all wrong.

You can probably tell I have little respect for facebook but I do agree with you that it would be nice to have our own solution. However, our service is priced to just barely pay for itself and we are actually in the process of lowering our prices (and income over the short-term) in order to bring our service to more users. So we must count every penny and are not interested (or able) to bring on investment like facebook did. They knew the right people and managed to sell vaporware. Kudos to them. We don't have vaporware but the investment climate is a bit pickier these days on speculative "new markets" like ours.

Thanks for the feedback and I hope you enjoy the service.

Actually, we do have a distributed platform but the storage array does share a common backbone. That backbone is what is having issues, unfortunately. We have evaluated alternatives, such as Mosso cloud, Amazon S3, NAS, SAN, etc. The only thing, at-the-time, able to handle our needs was an expensive DAS solution.

We have been evaluating alternatives again this year and Amazon S3 and others have made good improvements but may still not be good enough. Hopefully we will find something better soon.

Take it easy!