Chuck Hagenbuch

With the proliferation of hosted services and the cloud (5 yard penalty, unlicensed buzzword use, try again next post), a case has been made that people, and companies, shouldn't host things like their own email anymore. I've always been a proponent of keeping your own data, and privacy and data portability issues aside - sometimes services disappear. I don't mean GMail dropping off the face of the net for an hour here or there, but a service like I Want Sandy simply shutting down. This is of course an argument both for controlling your own data and for open source software. It's articulated well here:

http://itdied.com/2008/12/in-defense-of-shutdowns.html

The calculations change if you're paying for the service; at that point you have some level of commitment. But for free services? Keep backups.