I'm fairly sure that my downtime due to a hardware failure at softlayer would be less than the downtime AWS has had for huge numbers of people this year. And ha

I'm fairly sure that my downtime due to a hardware failure at softlayer would be less than the downtime AWS has had for huge numbers of people this year. And hardware failures on a given server happen less frequently than 1/year on average. Problems are just not as common if you're running on a handful of dedicated machines, and a single dedicated machine at a good host can handle a LOT without having to do all the crazy reliability engineering that running on AWS requires. You need backups, but you don't need that same assumption that you need to be able to failover instantly or you will have guaranteed downtime sometime soon. I don't think that that difference can be overstated, since it lets you focus on more important things.