The question is how much were you paying to use Photobucket? Nothing?
Someone
was paying. OK, storage isn't expensive, but bandwith is, as is staff time to develop and maintain the website.
So, they implement a charge for a service you enjoy using. The level is perhaps too high, but I can't see a problem with the idea of paying for a service that you use, unless you do your job for no money but for the good of others. Advertising can't cover all the bills either, Google has pretty much hoovered up all that money, so unless the company is to fold, they need income from somewhere.
Personally, I use Flickr and pay $60 a year for the service. I also use Blogger for
my modelling blog, and hope Google gets enough money not to slap adverts over it (I have one via them and I suppose they get income that way) and Wordpress for
my novel writing blog, which DOES have an advert they collect income from. For backups, I use an on-line service I also pay for. And back everything up on a hard drive as well. Yes, I am paranoid.
My guess is that someone at Photobucket decided to ditch all the people who used the service but didn't pay for it. Better have a smaller customer base that brings in income rather than a massive one that doesn't. OK, it's not nice, but the days of getting everything for free on-line are slowly going away.