[tkaemming]

Saying it "doesn't mean crap" is an exaggeration. AWS's physical redundancy offers a marginal increase in reliability (roughly 3.5%, according to their stats) at potentially lower cost than providing the same system in-house because of economies of scale. They never promised to be 100% fail-safe (and would be foolish to do so.)

[shahin]

The point is that they are not backing up your data they way they advertise it. The whole point of physical redundancy is to eliminate single point of failure yet from their email it seems that such single point still exist. Also if adding physical redundancy improves reliability only by 3.5% it means that they have different definition of the term.

[jodrellblank]

The whole point of physical redundancy is to eliminate single point of failure yet from their email it seems that such single point still exist.

Which bit of "multiple failures of the underlying hardware components" leads you to think that a single point of failure still exists?