Astrobin seeking fee increase

[glend]

I had an email from Salvatore, the owner of Astobin, in the guise of a survey, he is seeking support for a fee increase. There was a time when Astrobin was a hobby/sideline business for Salvatore, but now he is trying to convert it into a full-time job which can support his family (his words not mine).
I have used Astrobin to host my images for years, and each year the Premium subscription cost has increased, while at the same time individual Cloud based storage options (which did not exist when Astrobin started) have improved.
So what is your view on this? Is this another example of a business scrambling to save itself in the face of technological change? Or is it unique enough to hold on?
While I have no metrics to support my view, I have enough experience with Astrobin to form the view that user numbers, and image posts, are dwindling; this maybe due to a drop off in folks getting involved with imaging (for a variety of reasons: cost, time constraints, burn out, etc).
Your views?

[multiweb]

I reckon it should be a small fee per image based on file size on disk and resolution. Forget the yearly fees and premium vs. whatever else. Then his cashflow will be more in line with the resources needed to host the service both in term of traffic and storage.

[glend]

Good idea Marc. The current restrictions are for jpg sized files. As folks migrate to larger format camera sensors, file RAW sizes get pretty big, and thus reduction is needed to get them on Astrobin, and currently people just stick on links to off Astrobin hosts for full resolution viewing. I believe this has driven very experienced imagers to eschew Astrobin for other hosting arrangements, essentially Cloud based.

[skysurfer]

I have had astrobin as well, but now I host my astrophotos on a VPS which I can control completely myself.

[SimmoW]

Yes, its a pity, started off affordable, but now too commercial for me, wont be renewing.

[CalvinKlein]

I'm at my limit of 10 free images. I have been debating for some time whether to buy a subscription. I think this has helped me make my mind up to not bother and rather continue to self-host on my website.

[Bart]

I use PBase. The basic is good enough for me, I have hundreds of images on there.

[The_bluester]

It is actually not quite the case, you can upload uncompressed .PNG images, which is what I generally do, I have put some pretty big ones up but the coming wave of full frame cams like the ASI6200 etc might stretch the friendship on file size to see if there is actually a limit coded on the server.

I am not sure if I will continue with it when my renewal rolls around, but I have found it to be a pretty handy resource for researching equipment combinations, you don't generally get that functionality out of generic cloud based storage.

If the fees go up, any increase needs to be reasonable unless Salvatore wants to add an example to the Photobucket effect where it went from free to exorbitant in one fell swoop and while they might have gotten a sugar hit of revenue from the really big users who were deeply into it for hosting for web stores and such and could not do without it in the short term, I am pretty sure they would reflect on it now as being when Photobucket jumped the shark. I am not sure that I see any parallels users wise where there are likely to be a core of Astrobin users who would initially at least pay whatever was demanded to keep access. If fees go up by noticeably more than an inflation like amount, I will reassess.