Today I received this email from imageshack..


Quote:

ACCOUNT INFORMATION It take two to tango. Imageshack has been hosting images since 2004, for millions of people around the world. We are thankful to everyone of our customers, who have shared many beautiful photos using our service. Today we are at a cross roads in our journey, when some very important decisions have to be made. We want every one of our customers to continue using our freshly redesigned site, with many useful and easy to use features. Our commitment to our customers is stronger than ever before. Since the launch of our new site we listened to your voices and tried to do everything within our power to make the transition to the new platform as smooth as possible. We are continuing to implement new features that many of you have requested. You can get a piece of the new ImageShack by becoming a premium member, for only $2/month, enabling us to continue hosting your images for years to come. If we do not hear from you, we will presume you are not coming back and no longer require our services. Would you like to upgrade now or delete your account? We are happy to have shared our time with you, The ImageShack Team

Not only they switched to paid only.. they also kick us out?
Will they also be removing our current images?

Anyways.. one way or another I've moved on to imgur.com and so far it seems to be doing great.
Also, I've downloaded all my existing imageshack hosted images, banners and gifs to my computer, just in case...

Already they've been blocking image-loading based on IPs. (I got this info from JillsClickCorner once. Few countries couldn't view the images. So if we unknowingly promote anything to those countries, we would be wasting our money.)

Good old marketing strategy - Allow them to use it free. And when they become addicted, sell it to them.

Yes, definitely they will remove all our uploaded images. Probably they may give a deadline to become paid member.

SolidSnake wrote on 2^nd May, 2014 at 4:33am:

Today I received this email from imageshack.. Not only they switched to paid only.. they also kick us out? Will they also be removing our current images? Anyways.. one way or another I've moved on to imgur.com and so far it seems to be doing great. Also, I've downloaded all my existing imageshack hosted images, banners and gifs to my computer, just in case...

that's the risk with free unfortunately. Somewhere down the road it may need to be paid in order to pay for the bandwidth. I guess site advertising wasn't cutting it or they just went for a cash grab

Well, I'm not that addicted.. and as I said in my last post.. I've moved on to imgur.com which does the job well and for free, so that doesn't affect me much..
(apart from the trouble of having to change almost all of my image links...  [smiley=sad.gif])

Well it's not expensive at all but I didn't like the way they all of a sudden switched to charging for what they previously offered for free..
What they could have done is build their new version with upgraded management or editing features or sth and charge for them as premium.

But there should be space left for free service since that's what's mainly made people choose them in the first place..
It feels like betrayal or sth and I am not motivated to pay for that service now..

Small update on ImageShack..

It seems ImageShack have recently changed something in their site and most of the time, my already uploaded-hosted images there stop functioning when used in HTML code.. If I load the link in the browser it works fine but when embedded it fails to load, so I recently had to track them one by one and re-upload them to imgur and then change all my links to the new ones..