I'd suggest private hosting, but there are caveats on bandwidth for many services, and some may offer unlimited storage...
There is no perfect solution to remote hosted images, except when the site itself allows you to upload. Then managing the images and the storage requirement becomes problematic.
I run two auto fora, and one of them has a 9GB sql db, the other much less. One has 25gb of images uploaded, the other only has links.
Guess which one is easier to maintain!
