Self Host or Pay for Hosting

It seems like every day I see someone on HN reporting that their account at some well known SaaS product has been disabled and they've been locked out of their work. SaaS products are nice, sure, but they are risky, especially if your work or significant part of your life is hosted there.

The takeaway is that you should self host the most important things. What I mean by self host is that you should either run the service yourself or you should pay for a hosted product. If you are a paying customer, then you generally have some recourse if the host shuts you down - either customer support, legal/courts, etc.

E-mail is by far the most important thing you should self host or pay for. If Gmail shuts your e-mail account down, then you have no recourse other than complaining about it on Twitter, Hacker News, etc.

Secondarily, project hosting, blog hosting, and photo hosting.