Has anyone used an image hosting service?

As the web-heads may know, one of the problems of having images on your site is bandwidth theft and hotlinking - in other words, other websites who not only use your images without authorization, they use the image while it is still stored on your web hosting service's hard drives rather than downloading a copy of the image and the uploading the copy onto their own web hosting service's hard drives.

So, as a result, some of the "hits" on your site (instances in which people had viewed your images) are actually occurring when visitors are viewong your images on someone else's web site - but you have to pay for the bandwidth that's being used up to serve up those images.

I have heard that there are outfits which will host your images for you in exchange for ad space on yuor site, so even if there's no real way to avoid the problem of bandwidth theft, then at least you're not paying for the bandwidth that's being consumed by the thief.

One such service is Allyoucanupload.com

I don't know much about this & I assume that the webmaster-type forums can perhaps answer my queries, but since I assume a lot of photographers have most-images sites, was curious if anyone has encountered this problem, and has considered/used this solution?