Helsinki University has outsourced parts of its IT infrastructure to Microsoft. Even if outsourcing is cheaper in the short term than generating equivalent services locally, the net effect is likely negative due to the lost jobs, know how and independence. It doesn’t need a conspiracy to explain this self-destructive behavior, just bad decision criteria, which do not include long term and externalized costs.
If I need to reinstall a Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux OS (or mirror a software selection to another machine), this is how it can be done. On the source machine:
su
dpkg --get-selections > ~/Package.list
cp -R /etc/apt/sources.list* ~/
apt-key exportall > ~/repository.keys
Then just copy the files to the target machine:
I have not been keeping log files for my web server until the beginning of 2016, when I needed to trace access to certain files (I started to use awstats, mostly because I was familiar with it since I had used it years ago when my site was still running on a Red Hat server). In March 2016 I luckily started to use Let's Encrypt. I had used another "free" service before, which got recently into big trouble as they apparently had not control over their own security.