I switched from the dedicated hosting that he advocates to AWS long ago because I was always having things get broken by the people at Softlayer. For instance one time I upgraded my network port and somehow that broke my record in the issue tracking system so I could not longer put issues (or any work reports in.)
There was the clunky and expensive backup server (I'm not sure if it would really restore...) and the breaking point was when somebody added a new disk but they did it wrong so that the partition table got overwritten when the machine rebooted. I was able to fix the partition table but then I moved my files to EC2 as fast as I could because i didn[t have time to deal with that.
As for queues I wonder what is up with that. When I build systems based on message queues they work OK, but I've got an eye for detail and for architecture that many people don't seem to have because I always see other people get in trouble with them.