Isn't "non-issue" a big of an exaggeration? If the dry cleaners lost my clothes, the bank lost my money, a valet lost my car, or gmail lost my inbox I'd be angry.
If the bank lost the particular dollar bill that you deposited last week, but offered you a new dollar bill, would you get angry? If you rent a car from the airport every time you visit a city, and it's always been the same car, but you show up one night and they they tell you the car was in an accident and they'll get you another car, would you be angry?
Yes, but those aren't expected outcomes when using those services. That's the difference gdgtfiend was pointing out — you should expect cloud servers to sometimes go away.
They are expected outcomes. Banks fail (think 2008). Dry cleaners do lose clothes. Cars do get stolen. Plenty of stories in the news of all 3 of these. No so sure about gmail losing all your email, but I was able to accidentally access someone else gdocs once. I just logged in as me and saw a complete stranger's docs.
The expectation with these services you mentioned, however, is reliability.
The implicit (and explicit) volatility of cloud hosting should change that expectation with such services.
"Non-issue" is an exaggeration because it was potentially a catastrophe. But this is sort of the way these services "work." Servers/droplets/instances are ephemeral and replaceable, and their underlying data is not guaranteed in a failure.
