Clearly the right option depends on the specifics of the service and the team managing it. However, unless you have a spare server sitting around, you're in th

Clearly the right option depends on the specifics of the service and the team managing it. However, unless you have a spare server sitting around, you're in the same boat either way, right? Outages at serious cloud providers like AWS are usually restricted to availability zones, though there have been a few high profile exceptions where entire regions were affected. In general though, with AWS you can redeploy your server rapidly if you have your infrastructure blueprints kept as code, and your data backed up to EBS snapshots or S3. Just this week I had a high-traffic Wordpress blog shit the bed on EC2/RDS. Using the tools we built at OpDemand, I was able to clone the platform and get it back up and running in < 60 minutes without any HA. I think < 60 min recovery time is probably a stretch for most on-premise environments..