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Photobucket - Site Down?


grt

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I don't think it is down I think they are trying the pay for it or we will lock up your photos trick again.

 

I now use Postimage but I left the photos I had on Photobucket there as after the dust had cleared from last time the photos could still be seen on Auslot, now it looks like the photos have been blocked from Auslot and when I try to log in I go to a page to sign up for various plans for a cost.

 

Photobucket can Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Corporate greed is driving inflation.

Cash, use it or lose it.  No Digital Currency, No Digital ID.

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Just googled photobucket, and saw a twitter message advising the site has been down a couple of days due to a power outage.

 

When all the original kerfuffle happened, I looked at other sites, but I have a couple of thousand photos, and just couldn't be bothered moving them all. And then they finally saw the light and came up with a basic offering of ad-free hosting for $20 a year, which I thought was a fair price to pay, all things considered.

 

Generally find the site is fine as a basic hosting site, but their website interface to load and manage photos is painfully slow, prone to drop outs while loading multiple photos, and the login process is cludgy (usually have to log in, wait a few minutes while it does nothing, then close the browser and re-open, and suddenly I'm logged in), but for $20 a year I'm too old and stubborn to change or care.

Graeme

~~~~~~

 

(Life is like a sewer....................What you get out of it depends on what you put into it!)

https://gtoutweb.com/index.htm

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Same here Graeme.

 

I'm trying to up load some proxy results etc all day but no hope.

 

Photobucket deduct $80 PA from a credit card. I too have too many pics etc to change hosts. That said I have had no trouble for a long time.

I can't believe that I wanted to grow up

 

Mount Salt Panorama Track Combined Road and Rally Track built near Salt Pan Creek Padstow - Sydney

 

A quick build rally track

 

2017 WRP Round 11 at Mt Salt Panorama

 

https://i128.photobu...zpss7sqiwfj.jpg

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Just googled photobucket, and saw a twitter message advising the site has been down a couple of days due to a power outage.

 

When all the original kerfuffle happened, I looked at other sites, but I have a couple of thousand photos, and just couldn't be bothered moving them all. And then they finally saw the light and came up with a basic offering of ad-free hosting for $20 a year, which I thought was a fair price to pay, all things considered.

 

Generally find the site is fine as a basic hosting site, but their website interface to load and manage photos is painfully slow, prone to drop outs while loading multiple photos, and the login process is cludgy (usually have to log in, wait a few minutes while it does nothing, then close the browser and re-open, and suddenly I'm logged in), but for $20 a year I'm too old and stubborn to change or care.

 

You need a fast internet speed too.

  • Upvote 1

Smoke, mirrors and obsolescence. It’s a jungle out there.

www.scorpiuswireless.com

 

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

H E L P .....

 

Well, Photobucket site still down for my account, been over 3 weeks now. :angry: They keep telling I am one of the few accounts still not fully restored, and that most accounts are active and photos are accessible, but I have yet to see any proof that any of that is working. It lets me log in, but nothing ever displays, and none of my photo links from my website work. And their facebook page is full of similar comments from other users.

 

So, what to do......

 

Am tempted to migrate to another photo hosting site, and have experimented with PostImage and Flickr, to see what they are like. Both are a lot faster than photobucket, although I feel the album and image management is a little simpler and more intuitive on Photobucket (or maybe I am just used to it, having used it for god knows how many years now).

 

However, two BIG issues:

1. I have over 3000 images! Thats a lot to migrate, and hundreds of HTML pages and thousands of links to change.

2. Both Flickr and Postimage randomise their link addresses that you use to embed them in a forum, or more importantly, my website.

 

Maybe I've been spoilt or or just plain lucky with photobucket (and imageshack before that), but they both maintain the original image name, and the link name contains the actual album and sub-album names, and are therefore consistent, constant and derivable. So when I create a new HTML page, I can basically copy an existing page, do a global replace on the static portion of the image name, and presto, the new page works on a new set of photos. Now, I have gone to the trouble of using standard suffixes for every image, indicating the view of the photo I've taken (ie _left, _right, _front, etc), so if I have taken my standard set of 6 views of a car, it literally only takes me a few seconds to clone up a new webpage.

 

So, just wondering what anyone else with significant volumes of photos is using for hosting, and whether there are other hosting sites that use unscrambled links for their images, as I really don't want to have to individually cut & paste 3000 odd photo image links.

 

Thanks,

Graeme

~~~~~~

 

(Life is like a sewer....................What you get out of it depends on what you put into it!)

https://gtoutweb.com/index.htm

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Try uploading on webpage and downloading on app page.

Works for me.

 

Hi, once I log in, the photobucket page just locks up, and I can't do anything. And even if did work, none of the links from my website work, so its waste of time trying to upload more.

 

Been bugging them for answer and ETA's, but just keep getting the same excuses and no ETA.

Graeme

~~~~~~

 

(Life is like a sewer....................What you get out of it depends on what you put into it!)

https://gtoutweb.com/index.htm

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I couldn't log in on PC but was able to log in on phone.

Which are you using?

 

I am using my PC, but again, getting access to my photos through an app on my phone doesn't solve the immediate problem, which is that my website is now useless, as none of the photos are displaying because none of the photobucket links to my photos are working.

 

If it wasn't for that, I'd start slowly migrating my photos to another hosting site, but that will take me several months, if not years, as I have approx 500 separate webpages, each featuring one of my cars, and each containing an average of 6 photo links. Unless I can find a hosting site that works similar to photobucket, and doesn't scramble album names and file names, it will be a nightmare having to manually cut & paste every individual photo URL. My only hope of a quick switch is if I can do global edits on the URLs, which can only happen if the Album and File names are not scrambled, and all the ones I've tried so far do scramble one or the other, and sometimes both.

 

The webserver I am hosting my website on was a default offering through my first ISP, which was free but has a limit of about 50Mb, which is enough to hold the HTML and thumbnails, but not the full sized photos. I have switched to Telstra, but kept the old email account active, which keeps my website going as well, for $10 a year.

 

I'd be happy to switch a different web host, but not sure where to start with that. I've asked about it at the Telstra shops but they had no idea whether Telstra offers that service or not.

 

Anyone else run their own websites through a 3rd party host, that also has a big storage allowance? If I have to change all my webpages anyway, may as well go the whole hog.

 

Cheers.

Graeme

~~~~~~

 

(Life is like a sewer....................What you get out of it depends on what you put into it!)

https://gtoutweb.com/index.htm

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Hi,

 

Well, long story short (well, fairly short, OK, not too long), over the many many years I've been playing with, repairing and restoring old slot cars, one of the greatest sources of information and help was all the pictures of original, restored and customised slot cars that so many others have loaded onto the net. So about 20 or so years ago, I decided to return the favour and try and publish the hundreds of photos of my cars I'd taken over the years.

 

My ISP back then (alphalink) offered free website hosting for members, although the the storage allowance was very small (20Mb?), so I soon ran out of room. So I looked around for free photo hosting sites, and settled on ImageShack, as it was free, simple and they didn't scramble album or photo names.

 

After many years, I noticed a significant portion of my images were displaying the "no image found" icon, and after a fair bit of digging around and the usual run-arounds from the help desk, I discovered it was a fairly common occurrence to which there was no solution. Around 5% of my photos had simply disappeared. Luckily I keep all the originals and backups on my own PC.

 

So I started looking around again, and eventually settled on Photobucket, as they had a very similar setup and conventions, it was still free back then, and had good reviews. Back then, I had probably less than a thousand photos, and because it wasn't a sudden catastrophic failure with ImageShack, I spent the next 6 or 12 months, gradually migrating my photos and changing the HTML links in my website pages.

 

A couple years back, Photobucket spat the dummy and tried to fleece, coerce, threaten , encourage users of their "free" site to start paying a ridiculous, modest fee. It didn't affect my website, but did stop me using links from the various slot forums I frequent. Once they reconsidered and offered a basic ad-free and 3rd party linking option, I figured it was worth paying US$20 a year for.

 

Now, it looks like its time to move on again. So started googling website hosting for hobbyists/small businesses, and might start looking into cheap options like Hostinger, where I can hopefully store my images as well as host my own website domain for about $30 or $40 a year. I did look at Webstudio as well (thanks AussieSlotter), but I think they might be overkill for my very simple slot car photo displaying website.

 

Just that it will be a big migration task, and unlike the imageshack issue, my current website is unusable, so I can't really take the long slow approach. Fingers crossed that Photobucket will sort their s#!t out shortly, so I'll be able to cut over at my leisure, but I don't intend to renew my paid account with photobucket later this year.

 

Cheers,

Graeme

~~~~~~

 

(Life is like a sewer....................What you get out of it depends on what you put into it!)

https://gtoutweb.com/index.htm

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Can’t believe people pay to host pics....

And why would you put your pics on the net , I don’t upload mine to the net they stay in my albums....

You’re missing the point. This is for people who want to share pics on forums Yup everything costs. Would you host a billion pictures for free?

Smoke, mirrors and obsolescence. It’s a jungle out there.

www.scorpiuswireless.com

 

 

 

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Can't believe people pay to host pics....

And why would you put your pics on the net , I don't upload mine to the net they stay in my albums....

You're missing the point. This is for people who want to share pics on forums Yup everything costs. Would you host a billion pictures for free?

Audi%20Winner_zpsejf7fhyi.jpg

 

Just a test pic.

PB Worked immediately for me

I can't believe that I wanted to grow up

 

Mount Salt Panorama Track Combined Road and Rally Track built near Salt Pan Creek Padstow - Sydney

 

A quick build rally track

 

2017 WRP Round 11 at Mt Salt Panorama

 

https://i128.photobu...zpss7sqiwfj.jpg

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Maybe you’re over your limit? And they want money???

 

Nah, their entire site went down about 4 weeks ago, due to a "power outage at the data centre", and besides that, I am already paying for their service They claim to have restored most accounts and photos, but mine is still kaput, and this was the last email they sent me a week ago:

 

"Hi Graeme,

Thank you for letting me know and I am sorry to hear you are still experiencing issues. I checked your account and it looks like your account is still one of the accounts affected by the remaining systems that are slowly restoring. We currently don't have an estimated time when these issues will be fixed but we are hoping that this will be resolved as soon as possible.

I'll keep your ticket open and reach back out to you once we have an update to provide. Again, our apologies for the inconvenience this is causing you.

Regards,

Moss@Photobucket Support"

 

I've received several similar emails, all saying nothing much except bad luck buddy.

 

Still don't understand why some systems are working and others not, I mean, its just a photo hosting service, how many services would they run? Apparently their billing services are all working fine :huh: . I mean, I've been in IT for over 40 years, and I've never heard of any system that has taken this long to restore. Most commercial operations would have disaster recovery procedures in place, and would expect to cut over to a DRP service in hours or days. I can only assume they had no redundancy or DRP in place, and some of their older servers simply can't be restarted. But I wish they'd be just open about it and give their customers useful and valid information upon which they can make informed decisions. I'm just thankful this is just a hobby, and I'm not running as business that relies on them, and I've still go all my originals, so its feasible for me to jump ship. Just hoping to avoid doing so, but the longer this drags on, the less hopeful I've become.

 

Be interested to know just how many accounts are still having issues - is it truly only a minority, or is that BS as well.

Graeme

~~~~~~

 

(Life is like a sewer....................What you get out of it depends on what you put into it!)

https://gtoutweb.com/index.htm

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  • 1 month later...

Well, it took over a month for them to restore my account fully, although there is still the odd photo missing (which apparently is a known bug they are "looking into").

 

Then, to rub salt into the wound, once I could log in, I got a big warning page saying I am over my photo and bandwidth limit. Which was news to me as the basic plan I signed up on 2 years ago did not have these limits, it only had a storage limit, of which I had used about 5%. Apparently in the middle of last year they changed all their plans from annual to monthly subscriptions, introducing a big price hike and limits on the number of photos and the bandwidth you use for people to view them. I mean, seriously? After all that s#!t with the servers down for a month, they want me to pay 5 or 6 times as much as I am already paying simply to use what I have already loaded up? At one stage I even asked them to give me at least one good reason for staying with them - to which I got no response - surprise, surprise.

 

So, I have finally bitten the bullet and signed up to a new Aussie web hosting site - Hosting Cloud - it wasn't the highest rated, but was in the top 10, its local, and their fee structure is very simple (only 2 plans $5 mth or $10 mth), with none of this $2 a month lead-in bullshit I discovered on the highest rating site (Hostinger) which only applies if you sign up for at least 4 years - month to month was over $10 mth.

 

I'll get my own domain name gtout.com.au, and once its all up and running, I'll migrate my existing alphalink webpage across, along with all my photos, and I'll then have great pleasure in telling photobucket to f**k off and cancel my subscription. I know they won't give a rats, but hopefully enough like-minded people will get annoyed with them and leave and maybe then they might realise how badly they've annoyed their original client base - but like most other corporations, they probably won't.

 

I'm hoping to get better support and longevity from my new web hosts, fingers crossed. Will be interesting to see how easy the migration actually turns out to be - I've got 40 years of IT experience, but virtually no web experience apart from my own very simple, basic picture site.

 

Cheers,

Graeme

~~~~~~

 

(Life is like a sewer....................What you get out of it depends on what you put into it!)

https://gtoutweb.com/index.htm

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Can’t believe people pay to host pics....

And why would you put your pics on the net , I don’t upload mine to the net they stay in my albums....

Most forums didn’t host pics until recently so a host is required. Can’t believe..😊

Smoke, mirrors and obsolescence. It’s a jungle out there.

www.scorpiuswireless.com

 

 

 

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Can’t believe people pay to host pics....

And why would you put your pics on the net , I don’t upload mine to the net they stay in my albums....

Most forums didn’t host pics until recently so a host is required. Can’t believe..😊

I know a host is required...But I don’t pay or register with postimage an I can still put pics up on forums .......;)

Can’t believe..

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  • 3 weeks later...

Photobucket are at it again, now my "free" account isn't free anymore and I have to pay if I want to stay so I have deleted all my pics and cancelled the account. Most of the pics are from older threads so I don't think they will be missed but if anyone wants any of the photos let me know and I will put them up via another hosting site.

Corporate greed is driving inflation.

Cash, use it or lose it.  No Digital Currency, No Digital ID.

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