Photobucket could have introduced a low cost hosting model for people who post to forums. But they didn't and I don't use them any longer.
Their website became atrociously overloaded with ad scripting. I went from finding it "somewhat slow" and tolerable, to completely intolerable within the span of a few months. The only way I could circumvent the tremendous lag and unusable interface was to install Ghostery, an ad scripting blocker. That helped. But it's maybe 50~70% effective. The site still sucks, compared to the competition.
I now use postimg.org. Really fast and easy. The only drawback is that their auto-thumbnail links don't load the full image directly on clicking -- it brings you to the page where ads are displayed. But you can revise the auto-generated thumbnail links to correct that without too much trouble. I just wish they had nested folders, something Photobucket enabled easily. It would go a long way to helping organize the usage of photos.
So for example, I'd like to have:
StarTrek --> TOS
StarTrek --> TOS --> Actors
StarTrek --> TOS --> Scenes
StarTrek --> TOS --> Humor
Instead you have to have top level folders named like:
StarTrek-TOS-Actors
StarTrek-TOS-Scenes
StarTrek-TOS-Humor
Etc.