Here's my soapbox topic:

 

I'm very disappointed that many vintage threads on this site - and this is not just a problem on UO, it pervades the entire old style forum landscape - are littered with either the "friendly" PhotoBucket "Your image hosting has expired" message boxes, or, the blanks left when someone's web hosting they had their images on goes belly up.

 

There are tons of posts from the 2006-2012 era, for instance, where there are simply no images.

 

The most conspicuous (to me) example of this is the output of our departed friend Robert Pence.  I loved his photography... his stuff has just vaporized because he self-hosted. It was all gone after about a year of his passing.

 

I didn't intend to get into preaching or suggestions, but I had one thought:

 

A terrific inexpensive host that is suitable for images and is reliable is nearlyfreespeech.net. I use one site I host on it like my own private uncensorable Imgur.

 

You fund your account from Paypal, and if you set up a site on your account without a MySQL database or CGI - in other words, just a plain static web space - the expense of running the site per month is literally a few pennies. You can upload images from FTP that should be around for years - assuming you put in enough money to keep it going. And, you don't even need to keep a domain registered and paid - you can create a secondary domain under theirs. 

 

On NFS, money is deducted from your account to cover storage and bandwidth. If you funded your account with $50 it would probably serve a couple hundred meg of your  images for the next 5 years.

 

I just think all commercial image sites suck by not respecting legacy content. I know they gotta make a living but they are generally not consumer-friendly.

 

In the case of photobucket, they could easily display a low-res equivalent of the expired image, or even allow a visitor to pay from their own account to view expired images privately.

 

I have a few images here from about five years ago that are hosted on Flickr which are still viewable. Generally I don't trust most large internet companies over the long term. The provider I cited appears to be a bunch of hardheaded libertarian web techies and I trust them a bit more to keep the lights on than a dot com.

 

Anyway, my idealistic $0.02. Carry on.  :P

It definitely is a real problem and I'm not sure there is a good solution. I'm not as confident as you are that NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a good *long term* solution. The sad fact is that when you look at the Internet a decade from now, it will be unrecognizable in many ways. If you aren't actively maintaining your hosting/photo/content account, there's no solid way to ensure your content will be available publicly long term. Credit cards expire every few years. If you pass away, and nobody knows to keep up your photo hosting account, it will almost certainly go dormant in a few years. Just because NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is run by "a bunch of hardheaded libertarians" (as you say), doesn't mean that content available today will be around in a decade.