MixMan, the problem is more with how they approached it. There was no several month-long email campaign to inform their customers of the upcoming changes and to try to encourage them to upgrade or switch to another service. There was no "Here's some tiered plans that will fit your needs" or even a pay-by-month option for the $400 plan they were forcing you to choose if you wanted to keep your images up.
It was a straight up ransom for your images overnight, they quietly changed their TOS (which yes, they are allowed to do, but I've never seen a company be such a dick about it), and then requiring you to pay $400 UPFRONT before they'd allow your images to be visible again. That's akin to what's his face buying that drug and then raising the price overnight ten fold without so much as a "Sorry." And from what I've seen Photobucket has the same "Screw you, I'll charge you whatever I feel like and you'll be happy about it" attitude.
I'm sure if they had been more reasonable about it, like, I don't know, telling everyone well in advance that this was going to happen, then it wouldn't have been anywhere near as big of an issue. Sure people would've complained about it, but those that didn't want to pay would've been able to get their stuff off of photobucket's servers and completely eliminated the bandwidth usage. Everyone would have said that it was a crappy thing to have happen but what can you do, it's their business. Instead they set a firestorm with their terrible choice of action and are going to be hurt far more than they realize until it's too late (which it pretty much already is).
How would you feel if Google or Yahoo or whoever you have as a free email account provider just up and told you "Shucks, we're losing money on you so until you pay us several hundred dollars RIGHT NOW you can't access any of your emails and no one can send you anything more either."?
I'm an admin for a webhosting company and I can tell you, this move is a complete $#!& move on their part. Yes, bandwidth costs money, running a business costs money, etc, etc. But when you've built up your business on the premise of offering a free service as Photobucket did and then yank that out from under everyone simply because you weren't paying attention to your margins or suddenly got greedy? How is that ever an OK thing to do? Any idiot with a brain knows that's a very poor business choice. Sure, you don't have to always offer it for free, but if you're going to switch to a paid platform 100%, then you HAVE to give your customers time to transition or leave. That is not only the polite thing to do, but it is also going to give you the greatest return as you will get more people to sign up for the service when offering a transition (like offering a special price for the first year to people who sign up before a certain deadline) as opposed to simply shutting EVERYONE off and then demanding an obscene amount of money upfront. A good portion of your customers that might've stayed with a more well thought out transition are going to just up and leave due to the terrible treatment. And guess what? They've already invested in all that hardware and ISP connections to handle the load. Their margins are going to be thinner now since they'll probably end up with a lot of unused/underutilized hardware and staff that they are probably going to struggle with gaining enough income again to justify keeping it. More wasted money because of a stupid choice made by some greedy CEO. The only thing that will drop is bandwidth usage, but I doubt that will be enough to offset the losses they are and will incur due to this action.