You know how it is when you’re too popular: you just might experience a little blowback from time to time. In sex, you get a wide range of nasty wee infections, and in blogging you get “Bandwidth Exceeded” notices from Photobucket.
Apparently, nothing I can do at this point except throw money at them via credit card will restore those images before the 25th of this month. And I do not have any money and I do not have a credit card.
So bear with me while I, as always, try to find a free workaround. And disable a few key images, on the off-chance there’s a hotlinking nutter around here. Hotlinking is like crack to schizophrenics, actually; surely someone must be studying that link.
In the meantime, enjoy an assortment of my images that are hosted by WordPress; maybe I’ll just insert them at random into the blog where the other pix used to be. “Operation Global Media Domination” would be so much spicier illustrated by a picture of Viggo Mortensen naked except for a strategically-placed sock puppet.
raincoaster 
Photobucket should have a status page if you log into your account… under account options.
Try setting your album to “private”, because then people will only find your images via the blog. I’m using about 8 MB of storage on my pay photobucket account yet I’ve already managed to do 1.1 GB of image traffic (123000 hits on my images according to them) — I guess it adds up.
Maybe it will drive even more traffic?
Ooh, you SEE why I like you so much! Thanks a million; it still won’t bring the pix back for four days, but it should prevent this from happening again.
And neath, I think it HAS. I’ve gotten about 120 hits from some DSL forum and I half suspect someone there broke it just to see what it would take. I could be wrong, but because the forum’s private I have no way of knowing.
Hang on: the account is already set as “private”. Ah, well, it was worth a shot. Maybe my pal Raj will upgrade me to Pro tomorrow if I whine hard enough.
*waves to Raj*