Note that this guy runs a hosting company (<a href="http://www.gni.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gni.com/</a>) & is a potential competitor to EC2's offering. Also note that his primary complaint is the EC2's SLA, but the link provided by GNi for their SLA (<a href="http://64.127.96.201/Support/ServiceLevelAgreement.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://64.127.96.201/Support/ServiceLevelAgreement.aspx</a>) points to nowhere.
I agree completely.<p>There seem to be a lot of web-startups that don't really have a firm grasp on colo/hosting/virt servers/etc. It strikes me as strange that the server availability part of their business is often seen as some uninteresting messy thing to be outsourced to the lowest bidder.<p>EC2 is <i>great</i> for giving you moderately cost effective dynamic computing cycles. I personally think that EC2 makes for an expensive sucky web-host, and my guess is that over time (by the end of 2009) people will better understand EC2's niche.
Of course, if your own datacenter is down you don't get a refund either. You might get some psychological satisfaction from firing some of your own IT people, but that's unlikely to help your business much.
Startups shouldn't worry about uptime. Rapidly growing businesses should be building in failover and redundancy. Your choice of host doesn't change either of those facts.