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Comment by sachinag | Hacker News Reader

There's actually an element that's way overlooked: peace of mind. Let's say AWS goes down. 1) You can't do anything about it, so while you're upset, you're not losing sleep driving to your colo and back at 3am. 2) Many, many other companies - some of whom are infinitely larger than you - are also down. No one is going to mock you in TechCrunch for being down. They're going to mock Amazon, Rackspace, or whomever.

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OTOH getting Amazon to acknowledge a problem if it is isolated to your instance may keep you up all night as a recent post about a DOS attack highlighted, so I wouldn't say you're exactly off the hook when it comes to support of your site just because you don't control the hardware.

[EDIT] The post I was referring to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=860414

That seems such a dubious reason to do so, just because ignorance is bliss !

Depends on how you look at it. If you accept that your own abilities are also limited and that you might make costly mistakes, you might conclude that the total downtime will probably be the same. Say X hours per year. The difference is that if you use Amazon, you don't have to spend X hours (even if those hours are in the middle of the night) running around fixing it, someone else does this.

Then, when you need to explain why, you have an easier time too. There is the 'no one got fired for buying IBM' spect to it, but there is also genuine peace of mind.

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