How not to do business: dotPhoto

Just found out that apparently all my albums have been deleted from the dotPhoto server. Sorry if anyone was trying to find my older photos from there.

Looking at the dotPhoto FAQ I see there is now a policy on free accounts that if you do not log in every 90 days you just delete the albums so I assume that is what happened. So those months when you happen to be busy and don't log in - bam. There everything goes. Bye bye.

Wow.

That's really bad from a customer perspective. One day all your albums are there - the next, gone. Flickr have a much more sensible system of limiting how many photos can be uploaded if you have a free account. Perhaps dotPhoto might want to consider doing that rather that just destroying albums/work and preventing people from ever coming to your site again. Storage and bandwidth costs are cheap compared to customer aquisition. Just a thought.

In the meantime my recommendation is not to use dotPhoto - flickr is much better in every respect (and fingers crossed will stay that way). I'll try and re-load all my old albums up there over the next few months...