FUCK PHOTOBUCKET

So for more than five years now I have been paying to host most of the photos on this blog on the photobucket website. That was until earlier this year when they decided to increase their yearly fees by more than 1000%. Now they want more than $500au PER YEAR for me to host my photos for third party viewing on this blog. This wasn't of initial concern to me as they were still allowing existing hosted photos to display on third party sites like this blog, I just couldn't upload any new photos. I just stopped paying and started using Flckr instead. In the last few days though, photobucket updated their terms to state that they would no longer allow any 'third party hosting' to any users not paying this $500 fee. So now just about every photo on this blog before this year is rendered absolutely useless. They are essentially holding nine years of this blogs content hostage.
It seems that I'm not the only annoyed user, with a quick google search it is apparent that the distaste is quite widespread with even the BBC reporting on it. So fuck these extortionists, fuck photobucket. I won't be paying the fee and I doubt I will have time to re upload photos for nine years of posts to a competing hosting site, so I do apologise for the lack or viewable content on this blog moving forward. With just shy of nine years posting content on here, and a clear and obvious slow-down in activity over the last couple of years on my behalf (life, mortgage etc) maybe this latest development will be the nail in the coffin for this blog. I always imagined making it to ten years and then pulling the pin anyway. Maybe we will see.