Nice job staying on top of things, but looking in from the outside it does seem a bit wasteful to spend what, 100 man hours of effort and expense, canceling a h

Nice job staying on top of things, but looking in from the outside it does seem a bit wasteful to spend what, 100 man hours of effort and expense, canceling a handful of otherwise happy Friday nights, just to gain a couple hours uptime during a period where roughly nobody is using your thing. I had a site that was affected by another one of Amazon's outages a while back, and here was my disaster recovery plan in its entirety: a. go to sleep. There's a reason you farm things like this out to Amazon in the first place. They have a big team of smart people whose only job in life is to keep your stuff alive, or scramble like mad to bring it back up if it goes down. So long as your site knows how to start up automatically when the box turns on, there's really not a lot you need to do in a situation like this. If forty percent of the internet is down, and you're part of it, your users will probably understand. They'll expect you to come back up when the rest of the internet does. If you do manage to come up a bit earlier, you might get a shrug and a "cool", but it's probably not enough of a win to cancel Christmas.