I just came across this site that appears to allow free hosting of images.

http://www.imageshack.us/

(I am not affiliated with that site in any way.)

As we have our settings to allow members to use in-house avatars or link to a URL, on the surface this seems like a handy link to offer members as a reference tool for somewhere they can upload their images. From a site admin standpoint, are there any concerns I should be aware of when members use such a service? Bandwidth concerns, etc?

Any experience shared is appreciated.

Veronica

Instructing your users to host avatars & images on third party servers, or through hosting sites such as imageshack is actually a great way to save bandwidth! As the image is downloaded from their server, and not yours, their server is the one that is hit.

The only possible concern, and this is minor, is that if their server is down, then the image won't show on your site. But this shouldn't happen often.

Another good free site is Photobucket.com
They give you the URL, the Tag and the Img codes to each image right under the images too.