I have a couple of domains, one is my own surname .com, they are basically remnants from when I was the technical director for an ISP nearly 20 years ago, when the internet was a lot more like the wild west! One of the companies I used to use to have contact with back then (haisoft.net) is still going, they were an odd Anglo French lot, really above board though so I'm going to use their pricing for argument's sake.
Basic hosting of 1GB storage and 5GB transfer a month, with forum sized pictures of roughly around 500KB each, will give you 10,000 views of one picture a month, for £36 a year.
Next level up is 10GB storage and 50GB transfer a month, oddly enough is 100,000 views a month, for £75 a year.
So prices are not silly money, and the benefits are your pictures never go walkies and you have complete control, no ads with the benefit of your own content and domain name if you choose to. As to the merit for just personal hosting of images on their own I'm not so sure, there are a lot of free hosting sites around still, though I strongly suspect that the tide is turning and the free sites are just not making money on advertising alone and will go paid for eventually.
There are benefits though for a club like TDC to host images I think, mainly around historical items such as restorations etc. People come in and out of TDC as much as there are long standing contributors and members. You only have to look at the old archive board to both see a lot of names long gone as well as those still around, but the greatest loss of a lot of those posts is that the images are also no more. That great post that explains exactly what you're after with some great pearl of wisdom that says "and here it is explained in a picture" which is just a broken link image is, well, frustrating as much as it is a loss to the greater body of work that the TDC forum is from a reference point of view, let alone historical.
Gone on a bit...
_________________ Current fleet: '75 Sprint, '73 1850, Daihatsu Fourtrak, Honda CG125, Yamaha Fazer 600, Shetland 570 (yes it's a boat!)
Past fleet: Triumph 2000, Lancia Beta Coupe, BL Mini Clubman, Austin Metro, Vauxhall Cavalier MK1 & MK2, Renault 18 D, Rover 216 GSI, Honda Accord (most expensive car purchase, hated, made out of magnetic metal as only car I've ever been crashed into...4 times), BMW 318, Golf GTi MK3 16v x 3
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