We are in the process moving our dedicated (always on) servers to EC2 as well. Why? Because even so it is more expensive (almost double in some cases), we compensate this extra cost with reduced admin costs and increased developer productivity (need a server clone for testing? Done in a minute!).
I am convinced that the future of web hosting is AWS style.
The most reliable measure of true uptime would be transaction monitoring, e. g. simulating a login into all of these web apps. It also catches those issues were the server itself is up but the site does not work for some other reasons (database issue, javascript issue,...).
Or do you know that all your downtime was "total downtime", i. e. server not reachable at all?
This was much fun too read. What I really would like to know is how book stores will look in 20 years? It seems the author sees her store more as a hobby and is not really concerned about the future?
The C60 buckyballs and the related ideas that followed in the last 20 years are soooo amazing.
Nobody expected that simple carbon holds such amazing secrets after being the focus of research for 100s of years. There is still so much to discover in this world.