[randomanonymous]

Why don't people just be redundant and use multiple locations, or have a backup server at your business that can at least somewhat take over? It seems silly all these people rely solely on Ec2 and not have their own hardware anymore.

[acdha]

They could get the same thing by simply reading Amazon's recommendations and having EC2 servers in multiple regions as well. Most people either don't need reliability or failed to plan for it - the only difference with EC2 is that it's easier to add redundancy when you don't have to deal with physical hardware, network connections, etc.