You can ... sort of. Amazon offer dedicated instances: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/03/amazon-ec2-dedicated-instances.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/0

You can ... sort of. Amazon offer dedicated instances: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/03/amazon-ec2-dedicated-instances.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/03/amazon-ec2-dedicated-inst... Just rather than supplying the hardware you have to rent it from Amazon. Would be interesting to know how these instances were affected by the outage. Since the problem was with the EBS infrastructure not the actual compute hosts I'm guessing this wouldn't have helped any