ImageShack apparently shutting down free accounts and deleting images suddenly (now)

I have photos with 3-4 places and I went with paid for all of them, so I don't have to mess with loosing photos. Well, at least until they loose their database and backups, that is, or someone hacks them. I think I pay about $100 a year between all 4 sites, just to keep the photos up. It isn't cheap, but I had so many photos. At least youtube is free - So far...

The thing I like about self hosting is that all the photos stay at their same URL even if I change hosts every month. It doesn’t matter where the photos actually are as long as the URLs resolve properly. No one can lose my photos, or suddenly change the price for my service, or suddenly go out of business. They all point to a TLD (top level domain) that I own.

All those photos, a dozen of my own web sites, and a few of my client web sites all currently for $60 a year on EasyHost1, which is a decent budget host. Unlimited domains and email as long as you stay within I think it’s 100 GB storage and 250 GB/month bandwidth per account. Oh, and about $10 a year for the TLD.

Anything else, and you’re at the mercy of whatever image host. And if you change image hosts, yep, you have to go back and change every photo on every post on every forum assuming you find them all. Been there, done that. It’s worth it to point to your own TLD for that reason alone. All my links last exactly as long as I want them to.

Depending on the importance of the photos, I’d probably just recommend Amazon S3 with their insane redundancy and 99.99999999999999999999 (give or take a few nines) integrity guarantee. It’s really quite cheap too.

Or for cheaper cheapskates, Google Drive will probably be around for foreseeable future. This is an excellent option at least for pictures that will be shared publicly on a site like BLF.

I personally use my dropbox account to host my pictures. More control as to when I choose to ‘pull the plug’ or have a copy if the hosting service dies (copy is replicated on pc/online).

A big plus… getting link is just a right click>get link away.

Example: My flashlight folder in my public folder. (contains other subfolders for other stuff)

How many gigs do you have?

I got 13.59 GB. Got from referrals, uploading pics promo etc…
Check out this link:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/54?path=space_and_storage

I think you start with 2 or 5 GB space…I forgot. Should be more than enough to host your pics, get control of when you want to delete and get easy links :slight_smile:

Speaking of image hosting, could we contribute to buying a file server, which would be run by our admin?

Thanks for the warning, Wight.

My images are already gone, so I have sent a message to their support...

Seconded. They claim to never delete pics (unless you choose to do so), which has held true for me for ~3 years. Easy to upload/organize/edit/etc. And it's free. I don't anticipate it going away anytime soon.

Always make sure to maintain a frequently updated backup or two of your important images/files!

Always use mirrors. Related: List of trustworthy file and pic hosts

I host most of my images on abload.de

Here's my overview:

https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/21257

They offer free unlimited storage & bandwidth, and they never delete your pics. ;)

Maybe just a coincidence, but the pictures in all of HKJ’s reviews are not showing right now. Hopefully that will correct itself, I don’t think he uses ImageShack. What a catastrophe it would be if they were to go off line.

Whew, they’re back!

I’ve been on Flickr for nearly 10 years and I’ve never had a problem. Anytime I’ve ever posted an image here it’s been from there. Flickr is rock solid, I don’t know why they haven’t been mentioned yet. Maybe they have… I’m terrible at skimming sometime.

This was also the case with ImageShack. They’ve been there over 10 years now. Is this difficult for people to recognize?

That’s all really beside the point for the moment. Right now the focus is on trying to retrieve stuff from ImageShack if we can. I’ll add the link for “I Have Missing Or Broken Images” to the OP.

Anybody remember the rapidshare debacle?

Testing:

Moooo…
(sharing a pic from Google Photo. I’ve never used that until now, curious if this will work well. I have 15GB, and resize most of my pics down to 640x480 for posting; that should last a while. Might be a better option than just using Imgur. Some of the locations I work at block image sharing sites, so Photobucket, Imgur, and others don’t work. Google seems okay though!)

Never thought about using dropbox, I have an an account too.
Can you give any tips? Do the photos need to be in the Public folder.
Thanks

@keltex78 - IIRC Google also provides for convenient data liberation, see: Google - Download your data So that’s another point in their favor.

@Racer - Actually TLD isn’t the correct term. “.com” is a TLD and “apple.com” is a second level domain. Additionally, www.apple.com would be a subdomain of apple.com. What you’ve got is not a TLD. I agree that hosting on your own domain is a good idea for those who are capable. The process can be a bit unfriendly for some users though.

is there a “wight is back thread” that i missed?

See posts #26 and on in this thread. ;)

https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/32282#comment-881550