I use Tapatalk whenever I am posting an image. They host it and make it seamless, easy. It also prevents your favorite small-time forum from having the storage expense.

I suspect that Photobucket's business model wasn't working, and it was going broke trying to provide a lot of free services.  So it took the desperate measure of withdrawing its third party image hosting services, and demanding $399 per year to restore and continue that service.  However, the manner in which Photobucket chose to withdraw its third party image hosting services probably guaranties that it will fail, because every time somebody see an icon which says "Photobucket is no longer hosting this photograph," the viewer thinks "Wow, thanks for reminding me that I should never use Photobucket for anything."  Photobucket could have continued to host pictures which were downloaded to it in the past without charge, and only required payment to provide third party image hosting services with respect to future photographs, which would have been less damaging to its brand.

Yup, that would have made way more business sense. 

I can care less if they dry up an blow away as I have made sure I had a backup of all my photos I've ever uploaded on PB to my computer.