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We were using imgix for a while and were generally happy, but things started go downhill and some point, or so it felt anyway. Their support was always a bit op

We were using imgix for a while and were generally happy, but things started go downhill and some point, or so it felt anyway. Their support was always a bit opaque. And the service itself didn't evolve (as far as rendering. E.g. Composing more than one of the same filter wasn't really possible... for example adding two watermarks). We've also had issues with CORS headers that weren't resolved and our end users couldn't get images some times... We switched to host our own thumbor (open source), and couldn't be happier. We pay around a quarter or less than before (even with failover in place) as well. We really wanted to use a hosted service. We're not keen on hosting stuff out of our core business. But in this case it just didn't work out. EDIT: link to Thumbor https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor https://github.com/thumbor/thumbor

ShirsenduK 10y ago
I am in the processes to switching to thumbor! Glad to see confirmation of the solution. :)
- gingerlime 10y ago
  feel free to get in touch if you need any tips. Although it's mostly a black-box that "just works" for us. I was actually surprised there were no hosted thumbor services out there (I found one in Beta I think at the time I was looking, but we weren't sure how stable it is). Maybe because it's so easy to self-host that nobody bothers offering a hosted solution.
  - ShirsenduK 10y ago
    yup. I got a digital ocean box with nginx and caching up and running in couple of hours. Added some rewrite rules to make the urls pretty. Now just need to port app codes.
skuhn 10y ago
Sorry to hear that your experience with imgix wasn't great. Performance, quality and correctness are obviously super important and non-negotiable aspects of our service. While we have always heavily focused on these areas, we're going to double down for the short term. We do have some interesting solutions in the lab for more elaborate compositing amongst other things. Part of the challenge there is to stand up a new API interface, since the URL API gets pretty cumbersome for coordinates and tons of composites. We have some interesting ideas there, but it needs to bake a little while longer. It's also a challenge to get that new stuff out while focusing heavily on our core areas, but we have to do both. You'll start to see more exciting new things ship from us over the next few months. If you have a solution that works for you, that's great and best of luck. If you do ever feel the urge to check in on what imgix is up to, we would welcome it. Feel free to reach out to me directly any time (e-mail in profile) and I'll work with you to get what you need.
- gingerlime 10y ago
  Thanks. Not sure why you're being downvoted. Recognising those shortcomings is important, and I understand that you might not have all the answers to all customers. I think your support could have been more responsive though, and communication improved. You guys could probably detect that we weren't happy and about to leave. Reaching out at that point could have made a difference perhaps... We did genuinely want to work with imgix, but those hurdles left us looking elsewhere. These things happen all the time. Competition is a good thing overall. I'd like to hope that our feedback helps in some way. Even if it's hard to hear.
  - skuhn 10y ago
    Yes, your feedback is definitely appreciated, and I regret that we didn't act fast enough to retain your business. I will use it as a teaching exercise with the rest of the team for what we could do better on next time. The unfortunate reality this time around is that we got overwhelmed and had to focus on doing work that had the most impact to the largest number of customers. That meant that more personalized approaches to customer retention kind of slipped through the cracks. This can't happen again, and I'm adamant that it won't. I see image processing services as an important area for innovation and growth on the web over the next several years. It doesn't mean that imgix has to get the business of every site on the Internet, but fundamentally I believe that anyone who cares about how their content is presented should use a service like imgix. Doing image manipulations by hand, or serving non-optimal formats or sizes to browsers is going to be viewed as serving your site without using a CDN: it just isn't the state of the art anymore, and the benefits are worth it. I welcome competition from other companies who run competing services, or build-it-yourself solutions like thumbor, because that means we really were on to something: the market is real and these services provide real value to customers. I want imgix to be at the front of the pack, and that means doing the hard work every day to make sure we're there.

ShirsenduK 10y ago

I am in the processes to switching to thumbor! Glad to see confirmation of the solution. :)

gingerlime 10y ago
feel free to get in touch if you need any tips. Although it's mostly a black-box that "just works" for us. I was actually surprised there were no hosted thumbor services out there (I found one in Beta I think at the time I was looking, but we weren't sure how stable it is). Maybe because it's so easy to self-host that nobody bothers offering a hosted solution.
- ShirsenduK 10y ago
  yup. I got a digital ocean box with nginx and caching up and running in couple of hours. Added some rewrite rules to make the urls pretty. Now just need to port app codes.

skuhn 10y ago

Sorry to hear that your experience with imgix wasn't great. Performance, quality and correctness are obviously super important and non-negotiable aspects of our service. While we have always heavily focused on these areas, we're going to double down for the short term. We do have some interesting solutions in the lab for more elaborate compositing amongst other things. Part of the challenge there is to stand up a new API interface, since the URL API gets pretty cumbersome for coordinates and tons of composites. We have some interesting ideas there, but it needs to bake a little while longer. It's also a challenge to get that new stuff out while focusing heavily on our core areas, but we have to do both. You'll start to see more exciting new things ship from us over the next few months. If you have a solution that works for you, that's great and best of luck. If you do ever feel the urge to check in on what imgix is up to, we would welcome it. Feel free to reach out to me directly any time (e-mail in profile) and I'll work with you to get what you need.

gingerlime 10y ago
Thanks. Not sure why you're being downvoted. Recognising those shortcomings is important, and I understand that you might not have all the answers to all customers. I think your support could have been more responsive though, and communication improved. You guys could probably detect that we weren't happy and about to leave. Reaching out at that point could have made a difference perhaps... We did genuinely want to work with imgix, but those hurdles left us looking elsewhere. These things happen all the time. Competition is a good thing overall. I'd like to hope that our feedback helps in some way. Even if it's hard to hear.
- skuhn 10y ago
  Yes, your feedback is definitely appreciated, and I regret that we didn't act fast enough to retain your business. I will use it as a teaching exercise with the rest of the team for what we could do better on next time. The unfortunate reality this time around is that we got overwhelmed and had to focus on doing work that had the most impact to the largest number of customers. That meant that more personalized approaches to customer retention kind of slipped through the cracks. This can't happen again, and I'm adamant that it won't. I see image processing services as an important area for innovation and growth on the web over the next several years. It doesn't mean that imgix has to get the business of every site on the Internet, but fundamentally I believe that anyone who cares about how their content is presented should use a service like imgix. Doing image manipulations by hand, or serving non-optimal formats or sizes to browsers is going to be viewed as serving your site without using a CDN: it just isn't the state of the art anymore, and the benefits are worth it. I welcome competition from other companies who run competing services, or build-it-yourself solutions like thumbor, because that means we really were on to something: the market is real and these services provide real value to customers. I want imgix to be at the front of the pack, and that means doing the hard work every day to make sure we're there.