For a service like letsencrypt, the independence factor is also a major reason for self hosting.
I can forsee letsencrypt in the future going to building their own cloud (on their own physical infrastructure), but speaking as a letsencrypt user of their free certificate program, I would lose respect and interest in their service if they went with an AWS or GCP or Azure approach.
The independence from other major players (and the ability of their team to change and move everything about their service, as needed) is one of the reasons I use letsencrypt.
"one of" being the key point here. Let's encrypt has a huge number of sponsors (AWS being only 1 of 9 even if you only count the "platinum level" sponsors), which should allow them to maintain their independence.
I can forsee letsencrypt in the future going to building their own cloud (on their own physical infrastructure), but speaking as a letsencrypt user of their free certificate program, I would lose respect and interest in their service if they went with an AWS or GCP or Azure approach.
The independence from other major players (and the ability of their team to change and move everything about their service, as needed) is one of the reasons I use letsencrypt.