This seems to be a prevalent misunderstanding. Amazon's EC2 SLA of 99.95% applies at the scope of a region. A region may contain more than one availability zo

This seems to be a prevalent misunderstanding. Amazon's EC2 SLA of 99.95% applies at the scope of a region. A region may contain more than one availability zone. Hence, deploying on multiple availability zones still only affords the 99.95% availability level. Yes, multi-region availability on AWS is hideously expensive. However, some organisations value an availability of greater than 99.95% enough to warrant such a multi-region deployment. Clearly reddit, and many, many other AWS users, do not. This isn't a value call on my part; I definitely couldn't afford the inter-region data transfer costs, all I know is that AWS offers you the tools to deploy high availability web services.