"there are many things that are important but web hosting is not one of them"

Spoken like an ignorant developer. Uptime and scalability is just provided by the magic server pixies.

One positive is that you could rent/buy a much larger property outside of London for the same cost.

Or a nice car, because, lets face it, you'll be spending more time in your car than in your house.

There is no such thing as a "nice car" with respect to long distance travel. They're just not optimized for it.

Maybe when the cars drive themselves the situation will change a bit.

I disagree, the luxury and grand tourer segments are much nicer to spend extended periods of time in than say, a sports car with a heavy clutch.

It's probably an encrypted stacktrace

Yup, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youtube.com

And the advantage of this over gravatar is? The page mentions how to move from gravatar, but gives no reason why I should. Maybe a better API? As a user I don't care.

Gravatar now requires a Wordpress account for new users, which is an annoying extra step to ask users to do.

Wow I didn't know that. That is absolutely reason enough that gravitar should be replaced (from both end user and app perspective).

I agree, It's annoying taking the extra sign up process just to get Gravatar they need to fix that.

Absolutely agree - that Gravatar now requires a Wordpress account is a really shame. avatar.io should be capitalising on this, focusing on why a user would want use their service, not just developers.

I think it lets you integrate the avatar upload process into your own UI.