Cloud is great, but there str still plenty of reasons to run your own datacenter. Yes for many startups it might not make sense, but at a certain sized company/application it can easily make sense.
The real upside of AWS is that they have relentlessly pursued and killed off reasons for you to care about things like this. They've eliminated points of failure in their infrastructure and given operators a wealth of tools to ensure their apps stay up through any update or event (AZ-affine ELBs and autoscaling groups, single-IP ELBs, continuous improvements to EBS and S3, etc.) Given the scale of their infrastructure in us-east-1, it's now also highly unlikely that any customer will manage to overload it on their own.
They are getting much better, as all providers are. They're still just not a fit for many people because of performance requirements that are either impossible or too costly to meet on that type of infrastructure.
I've always said this: the cloud isn't a good fit for us; do what works for you.
If you're going to bring that up, I can't resist reminding you of that time you had poor sysadmins running up and down stairs with buckets of fuel to keep your servers running[1].
> I've always said this: the cloud isn't a good fit for us; do what works for you.
There are costs. Frankly, it appears Stack Exchange prefers to lay those on its people rather than its purse.
[1]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/11/se-podcast-36-we-got-h...
When your neighbor's house is on fire you don't argue over the price of the hose. You help. Our remote people that couldn't come help in person also helped them replicate their entire network in AWS as a backup plan.
I don't usually post pissed off comments, but you're dead wrong here and intetionally or not demeaning a good company and good people whom, because they cared, came to help in a time of emergency. I take it you weren't in New York during Sandy; it looked like a post-apocalyptic war zone afterwards.
TL;DR - You don't know what you're talking about.
It's sad that you can't handle a snarky comment (right or wrong) that was given in response to your own snarky comment. If you can't handle being poked and it pisses you off, don't poke others.
Also, you seem particularly offended that your altruism is being maligned, when you're also complaining that the GP was unaware that the action was altruistic in the first place (???).