Hi Chase Tarson,

Thanks so much for the offer. The dilemma is, that changing hosting breaks all the many short-links, and PB scrambling the file names breaks them too. The shortlinks are for instance you only needing to remember WCGDSH (Dashboard) or WCGPI1 (The Pie) or WCGFAM (GFAM). If you had them in the address bar, just typing these names out brings out the http://bit.ly/... short addresses then enter to bring them up.

For the moment they changed the red message to black and is now reading
It looks like they rethought their position and now just changed the tick box default of scrambling. Flipping that off would return state normal for me.

Am using SmartFTP uploading. If that tool allows managing the hosted files... moving/renaming/deleting/copying than I might still take you up on the proposal, as that is something PB has never allowed and would make managing the hosted files easier, then there still being the shortlink dilemma. Traffic for a long time redirected to advertise PB's front page "While you're here...".

BTW, in doing what they did, they messed up all the album statistics, so can't even tell you the bandwidth used, but remember it said 197MB on September 20. The album does show hit counts since September 13, which is when the mess started. There was since 10,700 views including Sept.25 when users found the service resumed, but then yesterday it dropped to 100... can't remember seeing any stat that was below 1000/day, so visitor numbers has been destroyed. They'll know the cost of their folly soon.

Thanks again

Same sort of dilemma for me too. If the signatures move to another location this means that hundreds of WCG members need to edit their forum profiles to point to the new location. That's not only the WCG forums, also other crunching related forums where the signatures are used as well. Who knows in which corners of the web these signatures are hiding..

I really appreciate the offer though, and I am tempted. What better then a free unlimited server with a short URL (very handy for a signature). I will definitely consider it when the time comes to renew my account at Photobucket (that's well into 2014), or when they mess up again.

My guess is the signatures use about 15 GB of bandwidth per month now (that's a guess because exact stats are messed up too by Photobucket - see SekeRob's post). That's about 1.000.000 file views per month. Storage usage is only minimal, about 10MB. FTP access essential.

Thanks again , SNURK

In that line I was thinking maybe Seke-Rob could move ONE of his over and see how it goes. Maybe even just the dashboard but not all the others and just see how it goes. I KNOW it will make extra work, at least in the beginning, but if it IS better then in the end it was worth it. If it does not work then a learning process was also worth it.

Thanks Chase, will look again if things go shifty once more.