It's a myth that dedicated hosting in several geographically distant data centers really costs that much more than cloud computing. With a little bit of care, it's quite easy to get very good value from such hosting, with far more control over it. Outages like this could be easily avoided, or at the very least dealt with much quicker.

It would not be the "end of a great many small to medium companies" were they to use dedicated hosting. Hell, this is how it was commonly done up until the past 2 to 3 years, and small and medium companies thrived quite well.

In fact, after the cloud outages of the past week, and a few other recent outages, more traditional dedicated hosting keeps on looking better and better.