@Mark 65
"No, and there's no need to be a patronising prick either." Why not? The OP managed to get away with it and it looks like fun.
"The point is you don't setup services and encourage users (or sheeplike followers with little real IT knowledge) to base their whole IT universe around them and then whip the carpet out from under their feet." Not so much hyperbole, but hyperbollocks, frankly. Apple are *replacing* the service *for free* in the coming weeks. Irrespective of how long you have remaining on your MobileMe subscription, they have given you until June 2012 (that's a whole year) for free so that you can make the switch to their new *free* service. They are only dropping support for iWeb. They are not the first IT business to drop support of a product, and they certainly will not be the last. To address the "sheep like followers" bullshit; 90% of the people that I know that use Apple kit are developers all of them very competent *and* successful. Now you can dismiss this a purely anecdotal nonsense if you wish (and let's face it, you will) but it is no less sweeping that your moronic and patronising statement about "sheeplike followers with little real IT knowledge...". Who's being patronising now?
"...let's not forget this is a company that went tits up in the past." Revisionism at it's best! They didn't go "tits up" at all. "Tits up" is a colloquialism for going out of business. Apple never went out of business, Microsoft apparently made sure of that. That's not to say that they weren't in trouble though. They were in a similar position that Sun found themselves in a couple of years ago, and unlike Sun they got themselves out of it. Dropping support for iWeb will not bring about the collapse of Apple, principally because not enough people use it.
"Do you really think someone who uses iWeb and its hosting is going to configure a web server on a third-party host or know how to reconfigure the deployment?" Some won't. They'll ask people like you and me. I'll offer my help of course, I guess you'll throw in a lecture on the evils of Apple. Some will be savvy enough to use Google to find the solution (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=iweb+without+mobileme) too. Again, you have the chutzpah to call me a "patronising prick"? Right back atcha!
"Is there any real reason they couldn't have kept things like the iWeb hosting part going? Really? Charge a little more maybe? No, they just couldn't give a toss." More histrionics. Contrary to your belief, Jobs hasn't sat in his office and said "You know what'll piss the nerds off? I'll cancel iWeb in iCloud and fuck all those sheeple I've conned in to using it along the way!" with his management minions around him, cackling away. They, as a business, made a strategic business decision based on information that none of us are party too. I'm willing to bet £10 to the charity of your choosing that the usage stats for iWeb are very low indeed. Yes it will affect a small number of people, but Apple have taken *reasonable* measures to mitigate this. The legions of imaginary "sheep" that won't be able to configure a simple web host now have a year to figure out how to do so if they so wish. My point is that your and the OP's decrying them as the great satan of IT is wholly unreasonable in this instance.
"I don't use any of their services, never have and never will, for just this reason but I at least acknowledge that there are less IT literate types that do and I don't have to belittle or patronise to get my point across." No, you just resort to hyperbole and histrionics with a smattering of hubris here and there. The odd strawman and ad hominem doesn't seem to hurt either. Oh, you do patronise by the way.