You mean Imgur and Reddit that keep going down and have always been notoriously bad at staying up? Not a good example at all. Also Twitpic didn't reduce their

You mean Imgur and Reddit that keep going down and have always been notoriously bad at staying up? Not a good example at all. Also Twitpic didn't reduce their sysops, they simply kept it low, AWS didn't do that, a server which serves much more complex stuff and many more people than twitpic can be run by one person, see stackoverflow. There are a lot of people out there who don't realize what can be done with one or two dedicated servers and one or a handful of good developers without ever mucking around with cloud. Cloud can just add yet another point of failure to a small business if it wasn't worth it in the first place.