Was hosting my photos for a few years on PBase which had a horrendous looking layout. Found out that a friend of a friend was a really really good web designer and was building his own photo sharing site called Half-Lime (http://www.half-lime.com
). He was a Russian native living in Brooklyn and his site got pretty popular with other Russians both here and abroad. I was pretty happy with it.
It wasn't much of a profit center for him, and as far as I know the Google Ad revenue he was getting didn't cover the bandwidth charges but it was his baby and he kept it running for at least 3 or 4 years. A few months ago he had a database crash and I contacted him shortly thereafter to see when he'd have our images back, he said he was rebuilding the dB and it should be back in about a week or two. That was back in October ... site doesn't respond at all now, I'm pretty sure he shut the server down (which was sitting on the floor in his living room) completely.
I was devastated - I had a solid 3 years worth of processed 800x640 photos I'd been putting up there, all my personal stuff, my family stuff. I never kept a local copy because I always had the raw files and I could always just download them from the site if I needed them - of course, I never considered that the site might go away 
Anyways, I had bought the billyngphotography.com domain years ago in anticipation of starting a side business that I have neither the time nor the patience for with a full-time job on Wall St and two kids under the age of 5 - so I decided to see what I could do with that. My web host provider, Blue Host, had this nice Simple Scripts option where I could quickly install a few different photo sharing freeware apps - I ended up with Zenphoto. My only complain is the lack of good themes - but the one I have now works okay for my needs.
http://www.billyngphotography.com
Not much up there yet as I'm just starting to re-process all my photos again. You can bet that this time I'll be keeping a local and Mozy'd copy of everything I put up there. Sorry, had to rant, thanks for listening.
