>We lost everything, our servers, and more importantly 1 year of database backups. We now have to explain to our clients, Fortune 500 companies why we can’t restore their account.

I think what you have to explain is why there wasn't a contingency plan, with your own servers, colocation, another cloud offering, etc...

When AWS has gone down in the past, it's severely impacted massive tech companies like Netflix and Spotify.

Why would there be an expectation that a 2-man shop have "another cloud offering" as a contingency plan when some of the biggest and best tech companies do not?

People use services like AWS or DO because they are the contingency plan - they have the size and scale that smaller companies cannot afford or implement.

prophesi

The difference is that when AWS goes down, Netflix/Spotify still have backups and could adapt infrastructure if the outage involved permanent data-loss. You're talking about the people who built https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey

I'd argue that it should be _easier_ for a 2-man company to adapt to cloud service outages, as they likely don't have to keep up with nearly as many backups or moving parts.