How to make an Image Hosting site ?

I came across some freeware and have found it very easy to setup and manipulate. Unlike some other freewares I've come across, Mihalism is always being updated. Version 5.0.0 is supposed to be released soon.

Mihalism Multi Host v4.0.2 (click link at bottom of page to get to site)

Sample site: hXXp://clhousingpictures.com

 

one more question to the image host owners
why do you let the users to hotlink the full size images ? (and post them at forums and sites)
whats the good for you ????

thanks

 

still brings traffic and new customers to your site. Check ImageShack for examples

 

imagehost need vps at start and dedicated when it become bigger , it's big consumer on storage and bandwidth

 

^^^
No really you can start on shared hosting as well and upgrade when needed. but yeah you will need lots & lots of bandwidth.

So, when your site grows it might be a good idea to get 10mBps unmetered uplink this would save you from bandwidth overages

 

if you allow hotlinking on large image people will eat your bandwidth in moment , because you want to think about it this way , if some one upload 20 photos and each photo is 500KB , this is a total of 10MB transfer per IP

so if he posted these 20 photos in one crowd forum as thread with hotlinking the large images not the thumbs , then every visitor see the thread will eat 10mb

so if 1000 visitor saw that thread you lose 10 GigaByte and in some chinese forums the visitors are up to 10K visitor on thread so you may lose 100GB overnight

and the worse is none of these 1000 visitor actually come to your site so you earn zero dollar from them they are just bandwidth consumer