Well, if you're web-based, there's never really been any better alternative. Even before "the cloud", you had to be hosted in a datacenter somewhere if you wanted enough bandwidth to service customers, as well as have somebody who would make sure the power stayed on 24/7. The difference now is that there used to be thousands of ISP's so one outage wouldn't get as much news coverage, but it would also probably last longer because you wouldn't have a team of people who know what to look for like Amazon (probably?) does.