Last time I ever trust that company with a service I rely on.
and before you ask no I have never used GMail
and before you ask no I have never used GMail
If you want to keep something running for as long as possible, you need to eliminate single points of failure like those (except yourself, of course). That means building a stack where each part is either ran by you or a replaceable commodity.
For example, I run my email, RSS and website on a generic VPS (of which there are many providers) which runs an open source stack that I know how to configure and maintain.
I still rely on other people, but not on a single person or company.
I only switched to self hosted for RSS recently though - when google announced they were shutting reader, I figured I'd write my own for an existing django site. Quick shameless plug: I released it on Sunday, in case anyone's interested - https://github.com/radiac/django-yarr
Which brings me on to my main exception for self-hosting: public repositories on github. The collaborative features they provide seem worth the loss of control - although their recent UI enhancements (making it harder to check issue counts, find repo addresses etc) does rather prove my point.
If a company isn't willing to ever close a service voluntarily, its going to have a much higher risk (because it can't adapt to market changes) of having to close all of its services involuntarily.
So, yeah, I'd agree with that.