Distributed Sites: Advantages/Disadvantages?

I have what I believe to be a good idea for a website. Not necessarily a giant money maker, but some functionality I think a lot of people could enjoy and benefit from.

From a skills perspective, I'm very capable of building and maintaining the site myself. From a time perspective, forget it. Also, I'd like to just be able to run with the idea as opposed to spending tons of time doing development.

What I'm debating is whether to use my own hosting and installing/customizing or developing applications vs using a collection of free hosted applications to build the "site". Using a variety of hosted applications is what I'm calling a "distributed site" for lack of a better term.

For example, I may have to write the core application myself, but maybe something like Zoho Creator would work. It's going to be related to photography, so why not just set up a Flickr group to share photos? A Flickr group would allow simple discussions too. A blog would be useful, so why not use Blogger? And if a wiki is needed, I could go with a hosted solution there too. See where I'm going with this? It could all be tied together with a common look and feel, etc.

Of course I understand that going with hosted solutions means a certain loss of control (and in the past that's been an issue for me). But I think that for this project, outside of the core application, I'd be okay with that, especially given the time constraints. I've seen some sites with non-technical owners become quite successful with this model.

Has anyone else considered this? What might be some advantages or disadvantages of creating a site this way?

I would never do that, much less control, and you can replicate all those same services for cheap or free using scripts you install on your site.

I agree with Chris. That's something I would never do.

Down the line, it's much harder to sell a website that's dependent on a certain service, such as Blogger or Zoho.