AWS is down: Why the sky is falling | justinsb’s posterous

This is a really interesting read. There are two sides to the cloud computing lark as I see it, though I’ve not seen the distinction drawn by anyone else myself: firstly there is the really dangerous idea that users should store their data online with various providers who are probably using the second part of cloud computing but who don’t have to be, which is really bad because it takes away control over something that is increasingly important in our lives. But secondly there is the idea of using elastic virtual instances over traditional always-on servers that sit idle half the time; it’s more efficient and environmentally friendly.

The problem is that AWS doesn’t really have much competition in the latter atm which is why it going down brings the web with it which is bad. I think that this also shows that traditional websites offering information should definitely keep running their own webservers; such sites at ten times more important than Web 2.0 and its friends and need to remain up.