Veteran webmasters will know what I’m about to cite as the biggest problem with services like CNET’s AllYouCanUpload, but before getting to that, first the things I do like about the service:

- no registration required. Just visit the page, upload your picture, grab the code and insert on your page.
- no image size limits. Although they do couch the promise carefully with “… at this time.”
- no bandwidth limits. If your post gets a traffic surge from slashdot, digg, etc, the images won’t be broken or blocked.

Now the main reason I won’t use the service: the future. The bigger this service grows, the more bandwidth it sucks up, eventually somebody running the service says: oh man, we have to find some way to pay for this service. Nothing is free.

And then everything changes.

It’s like those alleged All You Can Eat Buffet restaurants. Go eat only the expensive items and do it for awhile and they will politely ask you not to return. There is no such thing as as all you can eat or all you can upload or all you can use or the worst offender of the bunch: “unlimited.”

There are always limits.

It’s like the great article you find and blog about and link to going away in a couple months because the online news want to break links. The success tax is great for free services and very few survive on the web. Get your pictures out now — while you can. Maybe they’ll even provide free export tools. Or maybe they’ll just go out of business.

I know, I know, it’s CNET. Where is CNET going to go, you say? No big company is immune from shutting down or modifying their services in the future. Nobody.

TechCrunch calls this service “disruptive” and I agree. It is disruptive. To its competition now which some at least have a business surrounding the pictures, and to the minions who use these picture services only to have them likely be modified (limited) or shut down in the future.

Solution: host yourself
Bandwidth isn’t hugely expensive for images. You can serve pictures 30k in size or less to thousands of people a day and not even scratch burning 50 GB a month in bandwidth. Hosting companies like 1&1 are selling virtual hosting plans with 1500 GB per month for less than $20 USD per month. So imagine for a moment what you are doing as a webmaster when you put part of your content on somebody else’s webhosting service when you could do it on your own for pennies? There are also ways to limit that the images are only being served to your own domain (htaccess).

There are sensible uses for these third party image hosting services like your personal pages and posting to public forums — why pay for that bandwidth? I get that. They make much less sense being used on any business site, however.

There might also be circumstances where some want to take advantage of these free image hosting services temporarily. Use them to survive the digg/slashdot blast and then return to hosting them yourself, for example. Assuming this didn’t violate their terms of service, we probably wouldn’t bother doing something like this, but I can see where some might.

Guess I like the idea that if my website is up, the images, the content is up too. I don’t like thinking that visitors will come to the site and see text and some broken images because some third party site is rethinking their free hosting deal that everybody on the web is using. A lot of times we host images that can be hotlinked (with permission) from third party sites for this reason. Why slow down the page loading because AllYouCanUpload servers are getting hammered?

Great idea, free hosting for images for the web and we may use it for certain projects and sites here and there, but I’ll pass on using for anything I want to still be here in five or ten years or for day to day reliability. You?

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