VPS companies delete customer data for all kinds of reasons, just as arbitrarily as Dropbox. I’ve had VPSes at dozens and dozens of places over the years. I’ve seen them accidentally delete servers, purposefully disable stuff for what they claimed were hacked sites that weren’t actually hacked (so that’s scanning right there), I’ve seen them go out of business because the owner was 15 years old, I’ve seen them go out of business because they sold to Endurance or whoever, I’ve seen their data centers catch on fire — taking everyone’s data with it, I’ve seen them accidentally delete whole clusters.

And I excuse it in most of those cases because it is a VPS I pay a pittance for and don’t run production on, but the risk is always there. Trusting your data to Dropbox or OneDrive makes a lot more logical sense, especially if you aren’t knowingly violating any of their rules.

And yes, you can colocate. I’ve done that too. But I no longer have the energy to do that, especially if my box is in a data center I can’t physically access.

I backup about 5 different places because I’m always afraid of someone fucking me over. But for Dropbox to do this, is truly terrible. Especially for an unlisted rule.

Like, I'm confident my tech illiterate parents could get drop box running. Ease of use and UX are features.

I'm not saying the self hosted stack is bad, and in fact it's probably better in many ways. But it doesn't have the same feature set if you consider usability a feature, imo.