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A very pragmatic approach for serving tons of static content. S3 transfer costs are still pretty competitive, doubly so if you compare them to not just your own iron but the expertise on staff to maintain and scale it all. (unlikely you would ever match the S3 uptime even if you did)

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Not to mention that S3 buckets tend to remain online when EC2 instances in US-east are exploding due to <insert a problem related to EBS, network, or datacenter power failure>. :)

The last major outage for S3 was something like 4-5 years ago, IIRC. Coupled with CloudFront or another CDN, your site probably would be extremely resilient to traffic spikes or hardware/datacenter issues.

For elections 2012, we actually used S3 buckets in two different availability zones and CloudFront to abstract away the backend.

In the event that we lost a geographic region, we planned to switch to a different S3 bucket.

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