This generally shouldn't be a worry if you pick a large enough hosting company. Amazon isn't going to shut down its cloud service anytime soon. I see your poin

This generally shouldn't be a worry if you pick a large enough hosting company. Amazon isn't going to shut down its cloud service anytime soon. I see your point - as an individual, I will never use Spotify because I like owning all of my own .mp3 files and I don't want some streaming service to have my by the balls when I want to listen to my own music. But for the majority of business, it makes much more sense from a cost and complexity standpoint to use cloud services rather than having in-house servers and IT solutions. So I imagine hosted services will only be gaining in popularity in the near future, which should ease your fears of someone deciding to shut down the servers arbitrarily. AWS would find itself out of business pretty quickly if it let that happen to customers.