I don’t like people that are using recent EC2 problems to get an easy advantage / marketing. Stuff go down and cloud services are not magical, it is better to adjust the expectations.
But there are other reasons why people IMHO should consider going bare metal.
* EC2 (and similar services) are extremely costly. With 100 euros per month you can rent a beast of a dedicated server with 64 GB of RAM and fast RAID disks.
* As you can see you are not down-time safe, and to be down together with a zillion of other sites may be a good excuse with your boss maybe, but does not change your uptime percentage, so it’s a poor shield.
* A few problems you prevent in the sysop side, are translated in issues with the software you run (especially DBs) because of the poor disk performance and in general poor predictability of behaviour.
* It’s not bad to understand operations since the start, it is not a wasted effort at all, it is an effort, but it is also a good gym to have a deeper understanding of your production stack.
That said, with the money you save, you are likely to be able to duplicate your entire stack in two bare metal providers easily. This means that you have a disaster-recovery ready architecture that you can switch using DNS if things go as bad as yesterday with EC2.
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