There are downside to AWS other than reliability (a la Netflix). One of those is privacy. If you host with AWS Amazon has access to all of your user data, and with Amazon likely the NSA. If you want to maintain a free and open forum for people to express support for people like Snowden and Assange and question the NSA or military / industrial complex' percent of the federal budget (>50) then you have to run your own servers in a skilled, ethical, small to mid-sized ISP's facility.
This doesn't explain the penny-wise (IMO) allocation of hardware or dev/sysadmin resources of course.