Perhaps you don't understand. This is EC2 we're talking about, not prgmr. People run massive production websites on EC2 because it is reliable, predictable, and secure. It provides features that allow you to recover from outages and failures. For instance, being able to periodically snapshot your EBS volume to S3 and recover from a total datacenter failure within a few minutes by reconstituting the volume in a separate datacenter. However, this just scratches the surface on what AWS offers over a traditional VPS provider.