1. Calculate the odds that a company with the resources of Amazon will be able to provide you better overall uptime and fault tolerance than you yourself could.

2. Calculate the cost of moving to the Oregon AWS datacenter.

3. Reassure your investors that outsourcing non-core competencies is still the way to go.

4. Try to, er, control, your inner control-freak.

;)

> we can actually get into the datacenter to fix it.

But better and faster than Amazon?

I'd rather spend three hours at home saying "Shit. Well, we'll just wait for Amazon to fix that", than dropping my dinner, driving to the datacenter, and spend three hours setting up a new instance and restoring from backup.

When our datacenter is down (cause of our last two outages), we can actually get into the datacenter ... and watch them fix it. Or not.

There's not much sweating to do, as it always comes up relatively quickly.

How long was Amazon AWS "degraded" today?

2 minutes if you checked the "multi-AZ" box on your RDS instances or ELBs.