The points in this article also apply really nicely to websites and other services, many of which seem to make the mistake of outsourcing everything to other people&#x27;s platforms.  Oh sure, you may be using &#x27;the cloud&#x27; to host your webmail, or your forums, or your chat, or anything else... but what if that goes missing?  You&#x27;re in an even worse situation than the individuals using these services to host their personal files.  Remember what happened to IPBFree?  They were shut down for some weird, unexplained reason (rumour has it as a raid for illegal activity), and literally everything on their servers was wiped out.  Now imagine if the same sort of thing happened to one of these services, like Dropbox or the likes...  Millions of people would lose most of their files overnight.<p>Use such services for backups, sure.  But don&#x27;t rely on them too much, you don&#x27;t know what might be going on behind the scenes at the other end of the line.  You don&#x27;t know their financials (usually), whether they&#x27;re under investigation for something, whether an intelligence agency is spying on their servers, whether their security is up to par in every possible sense...<p>And if they&#x27;re offering it for free... well, they don&#x27;t have much invested in keeping you as a customer when things get tough.  Became unpopular recently, for saying something controversial or &#x27;stupid&#x27; on social media?  Made enemies in the political world?  Then a lot of companies will be quite happy to shut down your account to avoid bad PR.  By using these services, you provide a nice target for the social media mob the minute you do something that a lot of people don&#x27;t like...