An increase in pixel sizes has led to a demand for image hosting services that can transfer or store more than a handful of kilo bytes. There are a lot of image hosting sites that offer their services for free and are funded by advertisements on the site. There are also those that offer their services for minimal fee. Both packages adopt the shared platform hosting plan which is what keeps the costs down.

Free Image Hosting service: This has small to limited bandwidth. The hosting site is also normally littered with advertisements and generally only allows a few images of small file sizes to be uploaded at a time.

Paid Image Hosting service: This offers a much higher bandwidth. It also has no advertisements and allows the upload of multiple larger files.

How Image hosting works

It is a very straight forward process that can be carried about by anyone and should take no more than a few seconds – depending on the size of the image file and the speed of your internet connection.

First specify the location of the image file or files on your hard drive and click submit. The image is then transferred onto the service’s server. Depending on how the image host works, you may be asked to perform this task several times (also dependent on the number of image files you would like to upload). After this process, the image is now hosted on their site and can be accessed anywhere on the web by linking to the image directly or with the aid of a thumbnail.