[klodolph]

This is one of the reasons why business negotiation books will remind you that when you’re making a deal with a vendor, you want to make a deal that is profitable for the vendor and supports / sustains their business. If you don’t, then you’ll have to find a new vendor after they collapse (or get rid of you as a client).

For personal hosting I think one of the problems that makes this more complicated is that even as a group, you’re nobody’s biggest customer. You’re just a side business for someone selling hosting B2B, usually. I know that the local grocery store will make sure that they can still sell to local customers, because that’s the core of their business; I’m not so sure that cloud providers care much about my dinky website.