Just curious, why do you call EC2 a "slum"? We've had nothing but good experiences with it.
Reddit's recent downtime is a good indicator of how sloppy AWS as a whole really is.
See: http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-u...
https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2011-March/002786....