What happens to data when a Web start-up dies?

One of the greatest stumbling blocks that a start-up Web service company has to get over is customers' fear that the company will die and take their data with it. Manufacturers of traditional software can go belly-up without it immediately affecting a product's utility. And if General Motors went out of business tomorrow (I know, shocking), its cars would still be drivable. But Web services are different. When your cloud app goes under for the last time, it sinks customers, too.

In the best of the bad cases, when a Web service goes offline, the company in question is able to shut down in an orderly way and let its users know long before the servers are pulled off the Net. Large multi-product companies generally do this well. When Yahoo shut down Yahoo Photos in favor of Flickr, it gave users plenty of time to offload their pictures, or move them to another service. When HP shuttered the cloud backup system Upline, it likewise gave users fair warning.
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