I'm not so sure that is true. If you co-locate with a local ISP or even host within your own company you can also have outages. I suspect actually that outages are far more likely in that environment than with one of the big host providers. The vast majority of sites online today already aren't in-house hosted today. It doesn't really matter if it's major provider or a local ISP that goes down - down is down :-)

I agree though - I'm a big fan of having full control over my hardware/software. Ironically cloud solutions are making it much easier to host your own full Windows VM as opposed to just hosting a site somewhere which is much more scary IMHO.

The biggest issue to me with cloud hosting/storage is that it's still too expensive.

+++ Rick ---

>>>What I'm saying is that we're getting richer and richer applications to run as Web applications, and fewer and fewer apps are being done as desktop apps. When is the last time somebody asked for a new application as a standalone desktop application?
>
>That's possibly true for the PC arena. It's different on mobile devices where native apps have better features and offer a much better experience than web apps. Who knows where the data will end up... sometimes it does make sense to outsource data to a server off somewhere in the mist/cloud, but we only need to see a few more severe outages or data losses as have been demonstrated by prestigious cloud providers including MS and Amazon in recent months, and looking after your own data starts making sense again.