[mananaysiempre]

People want the thing whose functioning they are largely ignorant of to just be solved by someone else already, news at eleven.

It is, I feel, the responsibility of those who do know how these things work (e.g. us) to point out which things are important and which are safely dumped onto someone else. In this case, one’s identity on the ’net is very important, and something one should absolutely not put into position to be held for ransom later by being bundled with other services.

Do rent a hosting service, absolutely. (Do not trust it to hold the only copy of your data or metadata or social graph, but that’s usually something photographers understand implicitly, unlike e.g. writers.) Website hosting, DNS hosting, autoupload, social crossposts, whatever, buy all of that stuff as a bundle if you want—your risk threshold for redoing all of that after a hostile acquisition of your hoster is your own. But do not, under any circumstances, let them hold your identity at the same time. On the ’net, that’s your domain registration.

[mcnichol]

At least I know there's one person that gets it.

I've never ran into such brigading on HN before. I really thought I said something non-confrontational at first.

Wait till they get hit with their first domain renewal sniping attack. Then it's spiderman-pointy-finger meme all day when explaining who hurt who.