Hopefully iStock has a crash recovery site with a real time mirroring server running in another city at least 100 miles away from their main server site which is standard protocol for large companies who depend directly on the internet for their total revenue. This way, if their main servers were to be flooded or ever go down in Calgary, they could at least be up and running again from the crash recovery site in minutes with the flip of a switch.

But then again iStock can't even get their Connector program working correctly to mirror images from iStock onto the Getty servers in New York. They have been working on that for a year or two and it still doesn't work right, if even at all most of the time.

On second thought forget the possibility of an iStock crash recovery site operating elsewhere. Even if one exists, its probably never been tested, and if it has been tested they are still working the bugs out of it I am sure.

Perhaps we should all prepare ourselves for something like this: http://www.istockphoto.com/503

Theoretically a disaster recovery site is "standard procedure", but it takes a helluva lot of serious money, time, and testing to get your IT systems to the point where you can just "flip a switch" and make that work.  I've yet to work at a company that has managed it (and I mean companies that rely on the internet for revenue), although I do know of a few through colleagues.  Mostly big league finance places however, and the likes of amazon, ebay, google.  The fact is, disaster recovery is a major investment and iStock may have decided that the money they would lose being down for X amount of time (a day, a week, who knows) is less of a loss than the money and time they'd plough into a disaster recovery site.  That's a perfectly valid cost/benefit analysis.

Or, and more likely in my experience, they do have some form of DR site, but it's far from fully functional and would take hours to move to, see above re time and money needed to make the DR site perfect. 

Also, their servers may not be anywhere near their registered office so this whole point could be moot.

At least the worst seems to be over for Calgary, so sorry to hear about the deaths though.  Can't DR a person :/

One thing I've learned is that there are a lot of people doing very well in this business and not talking about it, and probably an equal number of people doing pretty poorly and talking about it like they just won the lottery. Success in microstock is a very relative term.

Long-story-short, I think you're going to find that this is a question that is almost impossible to get an answer to.

I used to work in the IT department of a large gambling company that had an online forum.  I could see the accounts of the people posting in the forums, their betting patterns, money they'd made etc.  The most vocal people usually hadn't placed a bet in months, and mostly losing bets at that.  Yet if there was a single problem with the betting website, they'd whinge that they'd lost thousands of dollars as a result, even though they didn't even have any bets on at the time.  I found this behaviour truly baffling, reading what was said in the forum and knowing that the individual was outright lying... for what purpose?  Why get so worked up if you never bet?  And there were SO MANY of those people.  Just bizarre.

The people who earnt a living off betting, and a small number made a million or more a year (yes it's possible, no I wouldn't recommend it unless you're particularly savvy and can afford to lose) never said a peep in the forum.

MS forums where you can see portfolios and downloads provide a bit of a check on individuals (even moreso where you can see downloads), but I've no doubt the same happens on all MS forums.

Nice.  I have an image I was thinking the other day might make a good triptych.  You've reminded me to go experiment.  What kind of stuff did you find yourself having to check?  I can imagine overall and individual composition, and alignment of each image so the lines flow from one to the next... anything else?

The Agency Collection, which was only open to exclusives (I didn't know what it was either, had to dig around).

They probably need it.  I've found Lightburner flaky and incredibly slow, it could use plenty of improvements and those don't come free.

I had my most recent lot done in 7 days, 22 images came through overnight my time (about 9 hours ago).  The times have taken closer to 10 days though in the past.

I just got a PP sale from 1st April.  Early this month!

I have 89 files, been on Alamy for five months, had my first sale in late April.

$1.00.  Woo-hoo!

I would say it really depends on what you want to photograph for stock.  With the caveat that I'm a newbie with a small port, I've uploaded and sold photos taken on a Canon G12.  Most of my stock photography is from a Canon 550D (Rebel T2i if you're American, Kiss 2 if you're Japanese), much of that with the kit 18-55mm lens.  Any reasonable camera will do just fine if you use it right.  As I understand it, the Canon 450D upwards are all good quality for your money, and I can definitely vouch for the 550D.

The views story keeps changing.  Originally it was an unexpected display bug after their big upgrade in September - the numbers were recording correctly in their database but not showing in contributors' views.  Then it was logged in viewers only were counted, but still a bug.  Now it's a feature and deliberate.

I don't tend to cynicism but this doesn't foster any trust.

I actually quite like Reef's second option above better than the finalists.

Yeah, helpful, me...

Welcome.  I'm pretty new myself, but have already found this forum an invaluable resource.  Not least to know that you're not alone when an inspector rejects your "awesome" image, or an agency's upload requirements want to make you tear your hair out