Amazon cloud outages causing customer defection: dating site says it’s splitsville

Amazon’s repeated recent cloud outages are causing at least one customer defection. Dating auction site What’s Your Price is leaving Amazon for a Fiberhub, a web hosting company in Las Vegas.

“We just can’t have this inconsistency with the service,” company PR manager Leroy Velasquez told VentureBeat. “It’s safe to say that because of the Amazon outages we lost business … and we lost some of our positive image.”

Two high-profile Amazon outages in June alone have highlighted the issue of cloud reliability. Amazon went down on June 14 due to a power outage at its Virginia data center. And just recently, on June 29, the same center went down again, taking Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and other sites with it.

That was the last straw for What’s Your Price, a dating service that allows users to bid on dates.

“Services focused on dating and relationships require constant accessibility,” Brandon Wade, chief executive and founder said in a statement.

“While you can watch a movie tomorrow if you miss it today, dating is all about the serendipity of meeting the right person at the right time. If an online dating service is not available, a user may lose the chance to meet his or her soul mate forever.”

I’m sure we can all hear the violins playing in that statement, but the fact remains: Amazon is going down far too regularly to be as reliable as owners of business-critical sites want. Valasquez told VentureBeat that “we had thousands of complaints … in an hour and half we received so much negative feedback.”

The company says it can’t judge the full impact yet but can’t take the risk of hosting with Amazon anymore.

“100% uptime is a required SLA for anyone providing cloud computing services,” says Wade. “Amazon’s inability to provide such service levels is the main reason we have decided to quit using AWS EC2 altogether.”

I can’t find other examples of companies who are looking to leave the cloud. Cost savings have fueled Netflix’ stated desire to deliver content on its own CDN (content delivery network), but reliability might well be another factor, given the events of the past month.

But if the outages continue, this small trickle could turn into a flood.

VentureBeat has contacted Amazon for a comment, and this story will be updated as needed.

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