Is Hosting My Images On ImageShack Viable?

[get2sammyb]

Hi,

I've just launched a video games blog [www.pushsquare.com] and have recently hit a brick wall in terms of image hosting. I don't want to host images on my own server because I presume bandwidth and file size will soon stack up big-time and so I've found a great Wordpress plugin that allows me to upload my images to ImageShack straight from the admin.

Are there problems with this method?

I've looked at Amazon S3 but they don't accept my credit card type

[christopherslost]

Well, there are the obvious problems such as the server you have hosting your images not responding to the data request to fetch the image. Then there is the obvious problem of you, for whatever reason, losing access to your account and possibly rendering all of your images useless anyway.

If I were you, I would just not worry about it so much.

If you're truly concerned about image bandwidth usage, I would recommend not using such large images in your archive listings. You could just provide the user with a 80x80 pixel sized thumbnail along with your blog excerpt. That is also the method that most blogging-based websites do it anyway. And a great deal don't use images in their archive listings at all.

[christopherslost]

Oh, and one more thing...

I've noticed you have your images resized by CSS.

For example, you have an image on your index page that is 720px × 480px (scaled to 456px × 304px). Even though you have it scaled down in size by the way of using CSS, the same amount of bandwidth is being transmitted as if you had not resized the image at all.

What you would want to do is just go ahead and resize the image to your liking, 456x304, in some sort of graphics program.

Just this will reduce your bandwidth load by quite a bit.

Hi,

I've just launched a video games blog [www.pushsquare.com] and have recently hit a brick wall in terms of image hosting. I don't want to host images on my own server because I presume bandwidth and file size will soon stack up big-time and so I've found a great Wordpress plugin that allows me to upload my images straight from the admin.

Are there problems with this method?

I've looked at Amazon S3 but they don't accept my credit card type

[get2sammyb]

Hi cheers for the responses. That's really helpful.

Any other information that can help the reduction of bandwidth with images is always appreciated.