I have some dirt-cheap $5 VMs that I use for banging around, but for anything important I pay extra for machines that are backed by actual support. You hope that you never need it, but when you need it, you really need it.
When ran into an early issue during our first few days and the support technician assigned to the ticket solved the problem. Then write back a few hours later with a change that he attributed to a colleague with whom he was chatting about it.
We haven’t had to call for support yet, but the number is in my contacts for when that day might come. We’ve been much happier than on EC2. We are spending about the same per month with much more to show for it in terms of our user-facing results.