Alexa’s service failed because it was extremely slow, snaps were rarely updated, and it did not have any features of snapcasa. I wonder how snapcasa was able to compete with amazon with their prices being so low?

I tried shrinktheweb but they could not match the performance and snapshot accuracy of snapcasa. They also cost twice as much.

I agree to an extent. I think the pricing was very reasonable, except that you had to pay for every impression and no option to download permanently. That was always my problem with using Alexa’s Thumbnail service. Whenever Google/Yahoo/MSN would send a search engine spider to my site, I got charged for thousands of impressions.

However, that was my only real concern with their service. Otherwise, it was very cutting edge and someone provided some sample PHP4 code that worked well. So, it was secure and usable. It at least gave me some direction in my various web projects, until I eventually decided to start ShrinkTheWeb. I needed something more cost-effective and being able to keep a copy of the image on my own server was the key.

Cheers,

Brandon

http://www.thumbshots.org

But I think Shrinktheweb will take it because of their great service and their vast selection of offerings. They are also cheaper.

In my opinion, considering the current market offering, Alexa did not reall offer a flexible (sizes, internal pages) and competitive (cost) service.

Why to pay for a service that can be matched and/or beaten by other cheaper or free services? The only reason I can think is the Alexa brand/service long estsablished reputation and reliability.

Currently, there are many alternatives for this screenshot service.

During my personal research, I prepared and compared 5 thumbnail services in this page:
http://www.4icu.org/ws.htm

The list is not exhaustive and this techcrunch page made me aware of interesting services that I was not informed of before.

To me it is extremely important to have noninvasive error messages when thumbnail are queued or not available. I do not like cheap or invasive messages appearing in my directories from thumbnail service providers.

Currently I adopt STW free service for a directory of newspapers I have: 4imn.com

In another directory I use software that save thumbnails in my hard disk and, then upload them in the website image folder. It is however very time consuming and does not update screenshots automatically….

In my personal experience a good thumbnail service should be:

- fast
- reliable and working all the time
- able to take good screenshots of any webpage, including internal pages/subdomains and flash pages.
- easy to implement
- provide customised options such as “delay time” before getting the website screenshot (especially for flash pages), different sizes, refresh/update options (website screenshots do get old!)

Do your research before committing to any particular service. If possible test their free service first and then, if needed, upgrade to the best paid service which meets your needs.

I retrieve screenshot without problem and fast.

if you interest just go :http://www.shrinktheweb.com

Best Regard.

The speed of thumbnail generation varies alot, but it usually is pretty fast. The snapcasa website is quite lacking in documentation, so you have to poke around a little to find out how to link to the thumbs (or you can just check the properties of the images on my site).

And please stop plugging Shrink the web, one or two comments is great, but asking all your customers to come here and promote it is just bad behaviour. This is getting close to spam.

I tested shrink the web but hated the website, impossible to find info, and it seemed like it (at least the free service) wasn’t able to create thumbs for pages below the front page, when I tested with my site.

STW provides for free a service that other thumbnail providers charge a lot for. So imagine what level of customization you get from when you pay for the premium service…?

I have been happily using it for over a year. That’s the best I can say.

Hope AWS & Alexa come to their senses!!!