[cbsmith]

> I feel like AWS has way too many moving parts to be stable.

Well, everyone has different definitions of stable.

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

I don't think it is inflammatory, but perhaps you have an idealized notion of how well teams manage uptime, and more importantly, failures, on average. Sure, a great team will do fantastic, but an average team will... not.

That said, it seems likely that AWS is hitting some kind of a rough patch right now. There are, however, other cloud services whose uptime records for the last year would be the envy of your typical company's internal hosting services, and I'd expect AWS to return to that fold shortly.