Is there a way to permanently save my photos to the iCloud? .
I thought they were being saved but just found out they are being deleted after 30 days. The whole reason I was using iCloud was for photo storage.
iPhone 4S, iOS 7
You can by adding them to a shared stream and inviting yourself as a subscriber (see http://help.apple.com/icloud/#/mmc0cd7e99). Shared streams are not deleted after 30 days. But if you accidentally delete the shared stream, you'll lose your photos.
The smartest thing to do is to import them to your computer as explained here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4083.