Photobucket Give-away

Two years ago, I started up a blog to document my adventures in freeware.

Unfortunately, I later discovered that my blog host didn't allow me to store any images on my site. The reasoning was that images can eat up a lot of bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money.

So (for example): if 100 people came to visit my site and they all viewed a picture that was 50k in size, that would eat up (100 x 50) = 5000k, or 5 megabytes in bandwidth. Obviously this isn't an issue if you're a small-time blogger like myself; nonetheless, if a blog host [company] is hosting 1000 blog sites and there's 100 people viewing 50 images... well, you get the idea. Bandwidth costs money.

Thankfully, I found a way around my dilemma.

The solution was to store my photos on another web server and then reference the photos through my blog site. It's not as complex as it sounds and as I later found out, many other bloggers do the same thing.

As it turns out, I stumbled across a place called Photobucket.com, which specializes in hosting images. From the Photobucket.com site:

" Photobucket is a free, photo and image hosting service that empowers individuals to publish the contents of their digital life ... Photobucket users are able link their images in any of their Blogs, Auctions, Discussion Forums, Albums, Emails, in personalized Photobucket albums, and in other unique ways that the Photobucket service comes up with every day ... Photobucket was recently named the Fastest Growing Site of 2005 by Nielsen/NetRatings and is now the leading image hosting, sharing, and publishing site in the world. [Photobucket] has over 11 Million registered users and [is] now growing by over 1.2 Million users per month. "

RE: Photobucket Premium Giveaway

I recently talked to the nice folks at Photobucket, and they agreed to let me give away a one year Premium account (which normally costs $25). The Photobucket Premium account allows you to upload up to 1 gigabyte of photos and images. In comparison, a standard free Photobucket account offers similar features (but is limited).

Here's how you can win your own PhotoBucket Premium Account

Email me a short letter telling me why you deserve a free Premium Photobucket account. Your letter to me doesn't have to be a written essay, but it should be compelling. Keep in mind that other users are entering the same contest, so your submission needs to stand out. ;-)

In about two weeks time, I'll announce the winner.

While you are waiting, be sure to drop by Photobucket and check out their unique service.

Good luck!

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