In an incomprehensible move, image hosting site Photobucket changed their terms about a month ago so that you could only use their service for 3rd party hosting if you upgraded to their premium account at $400/year. Overnight, they broke links to around a billion (yes, a billion) images across the internet, wiping out years worth of their users' content on blogs, forums and even eBay listings with no warning. Your choice? Pay $400 up front (no monthly options) for a service which has been free for over a decade, or lose your images. Some people have suggested that the new marketing model is based on the recent ransomware virus scams. My Photobucket images are safe until January because I'm a paying user, but I'm not paying a 1000% increase for renewal when rival sites offer the same (and probably more reliable) service for $40-$50/year. They finally sent me an email earlier this week trying to imply that I was a valued customer, and offering me a 50% discount so I could "beat the rush". The only rush has been all the users leaving a sinking ship. I have over 1800 images on HazzardNet (and over 8,000 on another site) which will disappear in a few months if Photobucket don't see sense or I don't find a replacement. Even if I do find an alternative, I'm going to have literally weeks if not months of work uploading my images to a new site and then editing several thousand posts to update the image links. I can't even back up my images at the moment - I guess everyone else is trying to do the same thing.