What is a Photo Hosting Web Site?

Photo web hosting sites like Photobucket, Imageshack and Flickr are mostly used for personal use only. Nonetheless, there has been an increase in the number of businesses using Flickr to promote their photos online because of the wonderful community features of Flickr. Flickr can really help your photos become viral and create a lot of exposure, which may be impossible on your own web site.

Photo web hosts are also a good way to put all your pictures taken from time with family, friends and co-workers into one place to share with your friend or to store them safely. Whenever you sign up for social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook, you can use image codes, HTML or links to place the pictures on your profiles. It’s a great way for the public to see just who you really are and get to know you as a person a little better.

Who Needs To Use Photo Web Hosting?

• Forum posters who would like to post pictures onto forum discussions
• Anyone who wishes to share their photos online
• Webmasters who would like to reduce the bandwidth usage on their own web sites by upload pictures to photo sharing sites
• Photographers, web designers and artists who would like promote their work on sites like social photo sharing sites like Flickr

Benefits of Photo Web Hosting Sites

There should be some form of photo to HTML tool for users to post their images to web sites, forum posts and social networking sites. This makes it easy for non technical users to insert photos into other web sites. Slideshows, picture cubes, and in more recent times videos, can be created to spice up your web site or social networking profiles. Even the popularity of picture phones have come into play for photo web hosting sites as you can now download pictures right to your phone. Best of all, you do not need to have your own web host to store your photos.

Disadvantages of Photo Web Hosting Sites

The only real disadvantage to using photo web hosting sites is the restrictions on photo sizes and bandwidth. It isn’t uncommon for a photo sharing site to disable your pictures once it has received a lot of hits from internet users. What happens is, they will ask you to upgrade your account to a paid account to continue the hosting of your photos. If you host your own photos on your own web site, you won’t have to deal with any of this.