Each time you attach a file, it takes up an amount of disk space on the shed server, the more space needed, the more I have to pay for the hosting, also, each time someone looks at an attached image that has been uploaded to the server, that uses extra server bandwidth, because the site is now rather busy and attaining approx 16,000 hits a month, this starts to build up quite a bit, in fact since it's birth I've had to increases server bandwidth twice and increase upload available space approx 3 times.
if you use photobucket there are several advantages.
1) Embedding photobucket images has no detrimental effect on server space and bandwidth.
2) Your images will be better quality.
3) You can use the same photobucket embed code on any other forums you may be a member of, or share to facebook or family & friends etc.
4) A photobucket account is free!
5) You can set up albums in a photobucket account and order your images per album etc making it all easier.
I don't want to remove the upload facility on the site if I can help it as it has some benefits, however as the server disk space is starting to get full again, I'm going to have to remove a number of the older attachments/uploads. This means that a number of older posts with uploaded images will show the message content but no file upload.
Obviously, using a photobucket account for your uploads won't have this affect and any older posts using photobucket or similar image hosting facilities will be unaffected. You can also do as I have and get a premium photobucket account if you wish that gives more features and only costs about 25 uk pounds for two years.
Thanks in advance for your co-operation with this one.
EDIT
I'm just in the uploaded files section of the site and there are 1891 uploads in there so you can see that it's quite a lot of disk space usage.
Dion
