[ceejayoz]

> I'm risking being inflammatory here, but do people really believe that they get better uptime from AWS compared to renting dedicated servers?

I haven't rented servers in about two years, but yes. My old MediaTemple dedicated servers and the pair we had colocated at a local telco's large datacenter experienced occasional network outages and whatnot just like AWS does.

IMO, AWS made load balancing and fault-tolerant setups much more accessible to small businesses. At the time of our switch, getting a load balancer at our colo was quite pricey whereas AWS charges $15ish a month for it. Getting a three-tier setup on AWS was easy, whereas at the colo we'd have to pay for at least 6U of space even for relatively small amounts of traffic.