The more I think about it, the more I understand the usefulness of hosted services.  For example, Gmail for your domain, picture sharer Flickr, bookmark sharer del.icio.us, video sharer YouTube, and even blogging tool WordPress.  I used to be under the impression that all these things can and should be hosted at one's own website.  It just seemed to make sense:  If you have your own web space, you should put all your stuff in the same place.  You should set up your website and implement a photo gallery.  You should collect and share links.  If you have videos or other multimedia, you should host them too.  If you have access to a mail server, you should implement that.  Why use a bunch of different sites when you have plenty of space on your own site? 

But I'm realizing the error in this way of thinking.  If your site goes down, everything goes down.  If something weird happens to your mail server, you have to figure out what the problem is and fix it.  On the other hand, if you stored your pictures on Flickr, you'd be using their bandwidth, not yours.  If you used del.icio.us to manage your bookmarks, you'd be using their reliable servers, not your own.  If you used YouTube, you'd be sharing videos with their web-based Flash player, not forcing people to download the right program and necessary codecs. 

Although I'm still not a fan of Flickr's maximum storage space and monthly upload rate, and I don't really feel the need for "social" anything, I can appreciate the usefulness of hosted services.  You get to use somebody else's bandwidth and reliability at the cost of customization and localization.  At times, that's a worthwhile compromise.