Well thought out, and your response to Bee shows you've had experience in IT and user pitfalls.

One thing I did for a while while I was running an ISP was I gave a hard drive to a friend who also had an ISP but was 500 km away.
It went into one of his servers, and I used FTP to transfer my data for backup purposes.
Unfortunatly I got out of the ISP 8 years ago, and he followed 2 years later, so that ended. (and I didnt get my drive back)