About the recent EC2 issues.
▼I don't like people that are using recent EC2 problems to get an easy advantage / marketing. Stuff go down and cloud services are not magical, it is better to adjust the expectations. But there are other reasons why people IMHO should consider going bare metal. * EC2 (and similar services) are extremely costly. With 100 euros per month you can rent a beast of a dedicated server with 64 GB of RAM and fast RAID disks. * As you can see you are not down-time safe, and to be down together with a zillion of other sites may be a good excuse with your boss maybe, but does not change your uptime percentage, so it's a poor shield.