[specialp]

It does happen to everyone including those hosting their own. What if your transit provider in your colo goes down? What if their UPS goes boom? That is why if you are hosting your own and will lose significant money on downtime you need to have another colo which adds a lot of cost. If you want to stay in AWS you can provision machines in other availability zones if things go bad quite quickly or have them running in other zones. You could also have redundancy by having assets with other cloud providers too.

[grey-area]

You should have offsite backups anyway, no matter what service you're using, and a quick way to deploy to other providers if whatever host/datacenter you're using dies. That applies no matter what sort of host you use really, which I think is what the OP tried to say - not that self-hosting is bullet-proof, but that AWS is not bullet-proof either.

AWS outages in one zone do sometimes affect other zones too, so it is not disaster proof:

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-the-hidden-bugs-tha...