Photobucket has stopped free 3rd party hosting, wants $39.99/month. What to do?

[Kyle_in_Tex]

A big part of TBN are the posts showing pictures of how to do things. It makes truly worthy threads obsolete at the whim of the host provider.

Please, do not use photobucket to host and source your photos anymore. (unless you want to pay the $39.99 per month fee for forever)

Upload the photos straight to here.

Can we get the max size of photos increased, so we don't have to utilize photobucket type hosts?

I see this as critical as to why many people searching for knowledge come here.

 

[s219]

I've never run into max size issues uploading attachments here, so it makes me think folks who do are uploading giant images straight from their camera. Not only is that wasteful, they'd be too big to view anyhow. So maybe the real solution is some sort of resize script. The forum admin of a boating site I use did something like that. It could be something TBN does as a routine part of accepting image attachments.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

Here's what I'm talking about for those unsure.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

I'd venture to say that it is in TBN's best interests to dis-allow 3rd party hosting ASAP.

 

[Sysop]

If they quit allowing 3rd party hosting, the costs here would increase dramatically. Storage and bandwidth are not free, and one high quality image can be the size of hundreds of text posts in a forum such as this. That would force TBN to do things like; increase advertising, create workarounds against users using ad-blockers, start a donation system, or create membership fees.

I'm sure the admins of TBN aren't "upset" about all of the old pictures on photobucket being gone from the forums, it give us (the users) reason to continue visiting, repeat the conversations and instructions that were ruined, and repost those old photos in new ways. All of which increases what revenue they get from the advertising already in place. Any changes TBN makes would likely result in less users.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

If they quit allowing 3rd party hosting, the costs here would increase dramatically. Storage and bandwidth are not free, and one high quality image can be the size of hundreds of text posts in a forum such as this. That would force TBN to do things like; increase advertising, create workarounds against users using ad-blockers, start a donation system, or create membership fees.

I'm sure the admins of TBN aren't "upset" about all of the old pictures on photobucket being gone from the forums, it give us (the users) reason to continue visiting, repeat the conversations and instructions that were ruined, and repost those old photos in new ways. All of which increases what revenue they get from the advertising already in place. Any changes TBN makes would likely result in less users.

You have many valid points, but I know the costs of Terabyte drives have come way down and hopefully the server costs that are associated.

 

[rekees4300]

Please, do not use photobucket to host and source your photos anymore. (unless you want to pay the $39.99 per month fee for forever)

I stopped using Photobucket years ago. Prefer to save photos on local PC where I have control. :camera:

 

[aczlan]

If they quit allowing 3rd party hosting, the costs here would increase dramatically. Storage and bandwidth are not free, and one high quality image can be the size of hundreds of text posts in a forum such as this. That would force TBN to do things like; increase advertising, create workarounds against users using ad-blockers, start a donation system, or create membership fees.

I'm sure the admins of TBN aren't "upset" about all of the old pictures on photobucket being gone from the forums, it give us (the users) reason to continue visiting, repeat the conversations and instructions that were ruined, and repost those old photos in new ways. All of which increases what revenue they get from the advertising already in place. Any changes TBN makes would likely result in less users.

Actually if I remember correctly, they prefer that the pictures be posted here specifically to avoid issues like these ones with Photobucket.

Aaron Z

 

[vvanders]

You have many valid points, but I know the costs of Terabyte drives have come way down and hopefully the server costs that are associated.

If you use a CDN the costs come down pretty drastically. For instance: Content Delivery Network Pricing – Amazon CloudFront

AWS is one of the more spendy options but also one of the better(they also run half the internet). To give you an idea a 75kb image can be served 13,333 times for $0.085. Most threads don't get close to that.

However it is cheaper(free) to have someone else host it, but the you run into issues like this .

 

[Sysop]

You have many valid points, but I know the costs of Terabyte drives have come way down and hopefully the server costs that are associated.

Not as much as one might think...

Desktop 4TB drive, $109.99:
Seagate BarraCuda ST4DM5 4TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive - Newegg.com

Server 4TB drive, $306.18:
Seagate Constellation ES.3 ST4NM63 4 TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive-Newegg.com

You must also keep in mind, servers typically do not run a single drive. They generally run multiple drives redundantly so failure of a drive doesn't cause downtime.