Don't forget that Heroku/AWS aren't immune to outages themselves. Their major outage last year (due to an AWS/EBS issue) put my app out of commission for ~16 hours (fortunately it was still in a small, private beta).
I've got 6 VPSes and 12 dedicated boxes and have never had an outage that long (self-inflicted or otherwise) in roughly 6 years. Granted, most of my dedicated boxes are managed by Rackspace and cost > $1k/month.
All that to say, I agree with your sentiments for the most part ... I just haven't seen the "prevention" of catastrophic events per say.
The company I work for experienced a two hour outage several days ago, with a Rackspace hosted stack. It was a hardware failure of some sort, most likely a disk in our DB server.
Nothing is really 100% fail-proof, and each "9" that you want costs an order of magnitude more than the last. I've been happy with Heroku overall, even though their major outage affected me pretty badly last year. They have learned from it, and don't expect they'll get caught by the same thing again. And they are much better at managing servers than I am.
("Dammit, Jim, I'm a coder not a sysop!")
I've got 6 VPSes and 12 dedicated boxes and have never had an outage that long (self-inflicted or otherwise) in roughly 6 years. Granted, most of my dedicated boxes are managed by Rackspace and cost > $1k/month.
All that to say, I agree with your sentiments for the most part ... I just haven't seen the "prevention" of catastrophic events per say.