Saturday, July 8, 2017

RIP Photobucket

Yeah so I got caught up in the Photobucket snafu.  They disabled all third-party linking unless you pony up $400/year.  Google it for more info.  I've been hosting hundreds of images there for nearly 12 years now (I joined on Nov 5th, 2005).  Virtually everything on my blog here broke, as well as many images I had on forum-based gaming guides.

It would have been nice to get some kind of advanced warning, but it is what it is.  Since I already pay for my own hosting—which is much cheaper than Photobucket's new option—I'm moving all my images there and updating the links.  To be honest I should have done this a long time ago, but I can be lazy at times.  It gives me a chance to clean up and reorganize them, so it's actually a good thing.

So they should all be fixed soon.  Clearly a few lessons to be learned from this.
  1. Always have backups of important content on a local device
  2. Don't depend entirely on free cloud-based services
  3. Don't turn something off abruptly without giving your customers advanced warning; they will be much more receptive to changes

There's a good article about this on Fstoppers.  I suggest you take stock of the web services you use, especially ones that provide you with income.  If they suddenly went away, do you have an alternative?  Do you have all that content backed up?


2 comments:

  1. A lot of people got caught in it.
    Never used Photobucket or any cloud device. I do back up my blog on my computer once a week though.
    At least your site doesn't look as messy as some that lost their images.

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    1. Oh mine looked pretty bad at first, I fixed the more important images and pages right away. Going through older posts is certainly a pain though. I have local copies of my images but I do need to do blog backups, good call.

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