budakinns

I know we have touched on this subject once in some random thread i cant find or remember so where we go. What are all of your thought on paid hosting such as smugmug, Photobucket and Flickr. Personally i think i am going to get a sumgmug account due to i am to lazy to finish coding php right now. I like the simple designs they provide and from my understanding and reading they are a good hosting company. Photobucket pro accounts in my book are crap for the amount but its better then nothing. Not a big fan of flickr but i do like the quality the images retain over pbucket. Those are my thoughts now for yalls. What do you use, used at one point but not anymore or what are you plaining on using.

Projekt

Photobucket, always have always will. I don't seem to lose any quality on it.

Hater

I use flickr for shots i want the quality to retain ad PB for just everyday nonsense.

I just cant see myself paying for hosting.

HUGHJASS

pbase.com

uber.com

pb sucks

Mars_302

Web Hosting by DreamHost Web Hosting: Web Sites, Domain Registration, WordPress, Ruby on Rails, all on Debian Linux!

you gotta pay though

Chris C.

Photobucket is not that bad, I dont know why people knock on it that much. Frankly, 98% of us are not professional photographers, so whining over 2 degrees of lost image quality is ridiculous. And $25 for a year of professional options from a hosting site is not that bad.

Flickr is probably one of the best all-around hosting sites. Great image quality, easy-yet-still-functional navigation, and has a great supporting community (Blogs, Contacts, Groups, etc.) The only relevant downside is the fact that free users have very little options, but Pro accounts cost too much.

Smugmug so far isn't bad, but nothing has made it stand out more so than the two above. Navigation and organization could use a little work IMO, but I like the concept of customization and Album's rather than individual photo's. Quality isn't that different from flickr, as far as I can see (or that matters). The only downside to SmugMug is the fact you HAVE to pay for an account. Until I'm deemed a Professional Photographer by some act of god, I won't need to settle for a hosting site that reqires me to pay. Especially when I only show half of my shots specifcally to you TR lurkers.

CEMAYHALL

FYI, Smugmug.com isnt "that easy" to set up...

Chris C.

Someone said it was?

And wait a sec, shouldn't you be defending SmugMug? Your the one that introduced us to it!

ITPete

Setting up my own server in my home was the best thing I did. Don't have to pay anything extra to host as much stuff as I want. I can create the way I want my gallery to look and don't have to worry about image quality loss. These days I am suprised more people haven't started doing this.

.:Chris:.

I agree here. If you can do it, coding your own page and hosting it on your own web space is the way to go. That's how I do it, and it leaves control up to me - image size, quality and everything else. I hope to finish coding my webpage in the next couple of weeks, and it shouldn't look lie any old smugmug or flickr page.

On a side note, I've been using this host for about a year (reliablesite.net) and they're pretty much bottom of the barrel. Their support sucks, I've had issues that they haven't fixed, and worst of all it's a windows server. I'm seriously considering moving back to pair.net soon. I used them for 9 years without a hitch, but they're just not cheap like the majority.

I disagree here. If I didn't care about image quality I'd use a P&S camera. I don't know why everyone makes refrence to the fact that "[we] are not professional photographers." I take my hobbies seriously, don't you? Photobucket negates any sharpening that has been done in photoshop and then some. I do agree that $25 is more than reasonable. That's $2 per month, or two quarters a week... less than a cheeseburger at McDonalds.

Sorry to pick your post apart, but I disagree here too. They've got image quality advantages over most of the competition, but they're geared too much towards their internal community for me to really consider them for hosting per se. I do, however, search their images and read through discussions daily. It's a great resource.

SmugMug is great for people willing to pay. I dislike the fact that even when you register a domain, your webpage ends up being displayed via their URL (yourdomain.smugmug.com). I'm paying for their service, I shouldn't have to advertise for them too. Their layouts are great for people that don't have the ability to create someting completely unique, but you can usually tell when you're looking at a smugmug page - if you want to stand out from the crowd I don't think this is the way to do it.

LOL, I know how that is.

+1 - I did this until I found my ISP to be unreliable, and sometimes they block port 80. Also, they sent me a letter threatening to discontinue service if I didn't stop running a server. This is the best route, but obviously not the easy way to go.

Lame excuse!