Photobucket was the photo host I used to do third-party hosting of photos to other sites like Mudcat, and in particular in the days when eBay charged for extra photos, I created web pages I loaded to the eBay site and linked photos from PB. It went along swimmingly until late 2016, early 2017 when they suddenly announced no more third party linking unless you paid some huge fee. The annual membership was something like $400 but you had to pay $700 or $1000 a year (sorry, the numbers were just big, but I don't remember them precisely because I didn't consider paying their hostage fee for my photos).

I had three separate accounts there and I dismantled two of them. One was there just to see what would happen next, and in the meantime I started exploring other hosting options. Microsoft has a site/offering called Azure, but when I tried to set that up the system mistakenly connected it to my official work email address (that goes through Microsoft now). I wanted it unrelated to my employer, so I finally (I think) cancelled that. I looked at other offers, sites with web hosting options and space; I tried running stuff through Dropbox and One Drive. Nope. Google doesn't work for it. I had a free account via WordPress so I finally decided to upgrade that to a paid account for about $3 a month, but I still have to figure how to third-party host through it.

Last week I got an email from Photobucket's new management, apologizing profusely and saying all of the old customers were mistreated. They want to do better, and will now charge about $4.50 a month for the lowest level account that permits third-party hosting. I'm not going near it.