Analyst on Amazon EC2: "We don't advise anybody to use this for anything mission-critical"

I've been saying this about EC2 for some time (and we have a product that manages EC2 instances, so I have a vested interest in seeing EC2 become successful). It's just not very reliable, when compared to the best hosts in the business--while EC2 downtime per year can be measured in hours, the best hosts are down minutes or seconds each year (of course, your apps and your system administration abilities can easily make up the difference--we've been offline a couple of times due to Joomla problems, and there's nothing a more reliable network or server could do about it). But, every bit of downtime adds up...and maybe your next big customer or investor was looking at your site at that very moment.

From our experience last night, 1 or more Amazon datacenters went off the net. Our instance kept chugging along while it was unavailable (but we didn't know this at the time). We were firing up another instance in a different data center (using the new trusted zones feature) when the outage ceased and our site on the original instance resurfaced.

Nice - there's a vote of confidence.