re: Amazon Web Services is down (economic question)

Here’s a little bit of advice, don't put all your stuff in us-east-1. It's always at the bleeding edge of hitting all the scaling issues. Use us-east-2. Since you’re in Bozeman, for example, if us-east-1 goes down, Oregon is almost never impacted, regarding business continuity. Operations will continue without interruption.

Plenty. Autodesk uses them for their servers and while we were able to work around it this time we aren't always able to.

They'll never give refunds for downtime and if you have interruption insurance you usually have to be down for a week for it to be worth making a claim.