TL;DR You can now have your albums hosted in the US if using jAlbum storage. Try now!
If you are using our storage (Premium, Power, or Super) your files have always been on servers located in Sweden. This is good for most of our users since most of our customers are in Europe. But we have many customers outside Europe too, and especially in the US. If that’s you, having your files in Europe isn’t optimal. It takes about 100ms (on a good day) for the data packets to cross the Atlantic Ocean so uploads can be slow and viewing the albums can be a bit sluggish. It has however worked so well that most of you haven’t been bothered by this.
Since we now are completely “in the cloud” we can change this, so we have now opened a storage hub in the US, specifically in Northern Virginia! If you and most of your viewers are located in North America you will benefit from having your files here instead of in Europe.
We have run some tests and for a user in the east USA with a fast internet connection1 uploading an album with many large files, like videos or large originals, the upload speed is about 3 times faster! Even for an album with only small files the new US hub is about 40% quicker than uploading to Sweden if you are in the US.
When viewing the album, complete page loads are about 30% quicker. It just feels snappier. If you have a slow internet connection, then that will probably be the bottleneck so the location won’t matter. But your viewers might have a quick connection and would benefit.
I have uploaded the Sample Project album with some videos added to both our storage in Europe/Sweden and to the new one in the US/N. Virginia. You are welcome to compare the speeds. If you are in North America, the one in the US should be faster.
If you want to switch, sign in to jalbum.net and go to your Settings tab. There you’ll find a Location link. Click it and you’ll get the option of moving your storage.
We can always switch you back if you encounter issues or are having second thoughts. We want feedback on this one. If it is well received, we may open up hubs in other locations.
1. Windows computer in Ohio with 1Gbps symmetric internet connection
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