To further your points with my own experience: When Heroku has issues during working hours, their support is great - you can pretty easily be put in contact wi

To further your points with my own experience: When Heroku has issues during working hours, their support is great - you can pretty easily be put in contact with an engineer or a product manager. The catch here is that there doesn't appear to be any guaranteed response time to any tickets (my urgent ticket (everything is on fire) from Sunday was accepted Monday morning). Amazon on the other hand is quite opaque - SQS/SimpleDB, for example, went down today for a few minutes (as in the service endpoints told us as such), but there wasn't a peep on the AWS status dashboard.