Photobucket has been a hot mess for a while. The constant barrage of spam/ads renders it borderline unusable, and I can't see how that would entice anyone to ante up for a paid service. I suspect they will fade into oblivion with this move, or get bought out for the name and resurrected by someone else.
I switched over to imgur.com, which seems to work well. Google Photos might be a good alternative too, although I haven't tried it yet (I do like Goolge Drive for cloud storage).