More Awesome Than You!

My Photobucket Pro subscription is about to run out and I discovered that they've hiked the price up from $25 to $40 for the year. This combined with the less than favourable sterling to dollar exchange rate makes it a big no thank you. I'm looking for alternatives that are reliable and have no advertising - hence the willingness to pay for the service. I mainly use this for Sims images so I'm not bothered about being able to post smut therefore no pr0n limitations are fine.

I use Photobucket and Flickr, but the free version of both.  Not sure how the pay version of Flickr compares to the pay version of Photobucket, but it may be worth looking into.

What do you get for paying at P-bucket that you don't get free?

MATYbukkit. You qualify for a MATYbukkit. You already bought your bukkit, so why not use it?

How much space do you actually need?  There are lots of sites for just hosting generic files that give you a few gigs for free, and if you want more all you have to do is create a bunch of sock accounts.  There's nothing special about "image hosting" except that (in my experience) the sites are incredibly slow.

Image Hosting is a specific kind of "hosting" where the files can be linked directly without rigamarole. Most file-hosting sites wrap the files in tons of rigamarole, so you cannot simply yank them by straight and direct HTTP downloading.

I've used hotlinkfiles.com (http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/) a fair bit. It has the advantage of zero rigmarole regarding linkage and (obviously) zero T&C concerning hotlinkage.

On the negative side ... it has on occasions proved to be very slow and clunky for uploading and once or twice it refused to agree I even existed.

But back to the pros, I have had almost no instances of slow loading of hosted images.

There is a monthly bandwidth limit on free accounts, but no limit on paid accounts. I have not needed a paid account and so cannot comment on that.