[wahern]

You don't use AWS because it has better uptime. If you've been around the block enough times, this story has always rung hollow.

Rather, you use AWS because when it is down, it's down for everybody else as well. (Or at least they can nod their head in sympathy for the transient flakiness everybody experiences.) Then it comes back up and everybody forgets about the outage like it was just background noise. This is what's meant by "nobody ever got fired for buying (IBM|Microsoft)". The point is that when those products failed, you wouldn't get blamed for making that choice; in their time they were the one choice everybody excused even when it was an objectively poor choice.

As for me, I prefer hosting all my own stuff. My e-mail uptime is better than GMail, for example. However, when it is down or mail does bounce, I can't pass the buck.