[djchen]

I have used AWS at a couple work places and I personally use Google App Engine. My sites on App Engine have less than 5 minutes of downtime per year as measured by Pingdom. Deploys to App Engine take a few seconds (though it can depend on your app).

You can choose to run your DB servers on top of generic compute instances in Azure or any other cloud provider. You aren't stuck using their database services.

> The claimed machine you get on cloud aren't anything like as performant as supposedly similar machines on dedicated.

This is true, I don't think anyone will dispute that.