Whether or not anyone has noticed, Photobucket has blocked the photos in all of my previous posts on Rypn and elsewhere since they have (without notice) changed from a free site to a subscription site http://blog.photobucket.com/please-review-latest-changes-photobucket/.

Does anyone use any other 3rd party hosting site? If so, how do you like it?

I stopped using photobucket years ago. Flickr. Its free, and oodles of space. For a few bucks, you can get unlimited space and albums. Plus it automatically resizes photos to many sizes.

Another vote for Flickr. No problems using it at all.

I have 4,537 photos on Flickr in multiple albums. And even at that I am at about 7% of the space that I am allotted by the Pro account. It is easy to link photos to forums and I highly recommend it.

I got burned years ago when Webshots went from a photo hosting site to whatever it was they became before they finally imploded. I used to have a rather extensive photo library on Webshots.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/33523379@N03/

Another vote for Flickr. I've used them a bit for years, no trouble... However, one can't tell the future. Flickr is currently owned by Yahoo, which is currently planned to be sold to Verizon, who wants to integrate it with AOL? Gack!

Photo hosting is one thing... but I certainly wouldn't store my only copy with any of these hosting companies. The thought of turning them into a ransomware operation, like Pbucket just did, is way too tempting.

Standard practice with Photobrexit or any free hosting of any kind whatsoever. There's no free lunch; what pays the freight is typically ads.

Ads only work if the user lands on the site proper to see the photo; the photo is then surrounded by ads. But a web site on site A can be told to load images from site B, and render them as if they're part of a web page on site A. But what happens if site B is a free image hosting site? They lose their chance to show ads. The freight don't get paid, and they are taken advantage of, as they must still pay the bandwidth bill. As such, they limit or ban it.

I've been seeing that photophuket's bandwidth sign for years, so I don't think it's a new policy. My hunch is they give you a limited usage quota and turn it off when you exceed it. And you just happened to exceed it.

Anyway, it may seem a timesaver to embed from other sites instead of using RyPN's own photo hosting, but it is bad for a different reason: the photo will disappear from RyPN if the external site stops hosting it. It's a 404 Not Found, but with an image instead of a webpage. RyPN is full of great articles whose value has been gutted because the externally hosted photos are gone.

No photo hosting site is any substitute for maintaining your own photo library on your own metal and taking care of backing it up properly and offsite. A cloud service such as a photo hosting site can count as "offsite", but only if you act immediately when it is discontinued.

For a few dollars a year ($20-30 range) you can get your own site from an outfit like GoDaddy and upload your photos to your own site, then link to them here. (You do have to learn a little bit of technical stuff, of course.) That's what I was doing till I discovered RyPN's file attachment method, and some of my photos on RyPN are still on my GoDaddy virtual server account.