There actually are several good reasons to run in us-east-1.<p>Something I hear a good lot is the latency argument - if you're a startup based in Boston, and your roundtrip to us-west-2 is 80ms (this is actually my roundtrip to us-west 2 right now), it doesn't matter - your customers on the west coast will see 80ms if you go into us-east-1, too. That's true, but your first customers will probably be local, and you almost certainly don't have the resources to be doing true multi-region deployments right out of the gate. So my personal feeling is - deploy into us-east-1 to give your first customers a good experience - _fully understanding that you are taking on some extra risk_, and pay it down as tech debt in time.<p>Another plays off this, but in a very different way: a hybrid cloud deployment, where the public cloud is used as an on-demand extension of the datacenter. Something I once saw was that the 80ms round trip from a Boston datacenter to us-west-2 actually expanded to massive connection latencies: 80ms for a DNS lookup, and then another 500+ms (!) for the round-trips for TCP and TLS handshakes to take place, all before a SQL query or REST call actually started. That was a complete non-starter.