[count]

Then engineer your cloud provided architecture to be resilient, in the same manner you do so with hardware.

At least you get $500 - with an onsite, self-owned infrastructure outage, you lose that $50k...and get nothing but pain and direct blame!

[vonmoltke]

Correct on both counts. Ultimately, if you lose $50,000 in revenue to an outage it is at least partially your fault. Whether you want the direct control of the entire cluster in exchange for the extra responsibility is an individual choice. My point is that offering to rebate a trivial amount of money in that case is pretty meaningless. Hell, I think its meaningless even if you have full redundancy and don't suffer any actual losses. I certainly don't see it as a perk of cloud providers.