You mean good old webhosting?
What I don't get about the HN crowd is making every simple, already existing, already proven, and already solved problem so damn hard.
I'm in EU, I host my websites at multiple local webhosting companies. They're small enough to care about support and big enough to guarantee speedy and reliable service. By law they're not allowed to go through my data (ofcourse they can and I have no way of proving that they did), so the legal deal between me and them is crystal clear. Who do you call when your Amazon Web Shit serverless thingy doesn't work no more?
I can and did move several webapps and websites from one webhosting company to the other. It works flawless. And besides waiting a couple of hours for a DNS change, it's almost instant. I get it, you can't do that easily with a system with million users.
This so called problem was already solved decades ago. It was called personal computers and the internet. When people started calling the internet 'the cloud' then things went downhill.
Excuse me for the slight rant. I should go outside and see some more sun. ;)
Yes, this is solved. I'm saying that there's another problem that needs to be solved too: control over data.
Regardless of what you use for hosting your own stuff, if you want to use a third-party SaaS as a user, they own the data. Want to make a document on Google Docs? That document lives on Google's servers, it's forever tied to their service and mined by them. There's no artifact you can hold on to, other than your user account.
What we need is a system where the data for that Google Docs document lives in a place you control - be it your own hardware, or some hosting you rent somewhere. It's the SaaS that should come to the data, and operate on it there. That way, if you lose your Google Docs account, or decide to edit the document with something else, you actually have that document, in its canonical form. Same for all other SaaS.
In an ideal world, yes. In practice, that's impossible to do up front, so the next best thing would be open formats - i.e. openly and fully documented ones. The goal is to break the leverage a vendor has over the users when using a closed, proprietary format.
