Loss of data after 6 months did not seem that bad after I read that Amazon shuts down your MySQL (RDS) instance every week for up to 4 hours "for maintenance"
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/10/introducing-rds-the-amazo...
Edit: wording fix
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/10/introducing-rds-the-amazo...
Edit: wording fix
For larger sites, this seems like it would hardly be a problem...if you have a pool of RDS instances, you could just stagger the maintenance windows so you never have more than 1 of your instances down at a time.