Photosuckit having second thoughts?

[mklotz]

Got an email from Photosuckit today...

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Hello ,

We would like to offer a tailored plan for users just like you - our Premium plan for $119.99 / year.

The Premium plan will provide 3rd party hosting for non-commercial use on your forums, blogs, and personal websites*. Additionally, you will be able to store up to 300,000 photos.

We are working on some exciting changes for 2018. This is our exclusive introductory price and this offer will expire in 7 days.

Thank you very much for your continued support.

-Sebastian

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Looks like they may be having second thoughts about their ransomware approach.

[Toolmaker51]

I'm always attracted to services using the "We're working on exciting changes" pitch.
No recollection of such efforts generating so much as a yawn. Equals "It' FUN", "New package, same great product", and other advertising fluff. If it's so fun or grand, why aren't the factors obvious?
The ever popular "Brief Customer Survey" takes the cake. Really about how much can we trim before they holler?
$5 ATM fees anyone?

[Jon]

Too bad nobody trusts Photobucket anymore, at any price.

BTW, thanks mklotz for pointing out during the Photobucket fiasco that YouTube can pull the same move if they want. I ended up running a caching bot on the YouTube video urls posted on the forum; 1 month, 1827 videos, and about 112 gigs later, the bot had backed up around 95% of the YouTube videos from this forum. It will still be a hassle to shift over to local video hosting, and we'll have to keep regularly caching videos to stay up-to-date, but a major loss of years of videos is averted.

Now I'm considering using an auto image cacher on the forum; when someone posts an image, we'll cache it, and host the cached version ourselves. If Photobucket's maneuver becomes more commonplace in the future, we'll be thanking them for the early warning.