Absolutely. I'm pretty shocked by the amount of downtime they've been having. I've been hosting with various providers for almost 10 years. I'm now with Soft

Absolutely. I'm pretty shocked by the amount of downtime they've been having. I've been hosting with various providers for almost 10 years. I'm now with SoftLayer and VERY happy. In those 10 years, I think I've had less combined downtime than AWS has had in the last 6 months. The big advantage to running your apps in a nebulous "cloud", aside from the scaling up-down flexibility, is that in theory the difficulty in running a stable data center (or ideally set of load balanced, geo-graphically diverse data centers) is taken care of for you. If the reality is it's a trade-off between getting easy scaling, and losing decent uptime numbers, I'll take the "hassle" of adding/dropping servers at SoftLayer which are actually UP, and which I have good visibility into, any day. Hopefully they'll get to that point eventually, but for now, I'm staying far far away.