>You get what you pay for.
If this is supposed to be some dig against going with little cloud services and then being surprised by outages, please share your thoughts on Amazon's EBS outages that have taken many of the highest trafficked services online out 3 times in the last 2 years. Or Microsoft's multple cloud service failures that have dragged things to a halt at many businesses using Office online. Or look to Slashdot's own front page yesterday and today to see coverage of Adobe's Creative Cloud service being offline for 28 hours.
> I don't think VPS fits directly into the cloud conversation
VPS's are considered cloud, you're virtualizing hardware and paying someone else to maintain those VMs on their infrastructure with (supposedly) no need to concern yourself with the maintenance of that underlying hardware or network infrastructure. How is that not cloud? I brought my experience with one provider up because it falls into those parameters.
>This would be no different then a collocation getting DOS'd
Ah, but it is. Firstly, most cloud providers are co-locating within another facility themselves instead of owning the place. Secondly and most importantly, if my co-location provider has a spectacular failure of some sort, I still have the option of going down to the datacenter with my truck and loading all *my* servers into the back then going across the street to another co-lo. With cloud providers, they're hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and you don't own anything in their facilities so you have no recourse unless you have local backups of everything to start elsewhere (which you should). And even if you have backups, I would be willing to bet you don't have bare-metal VM copies so you'll be provisioning new VMs and installing your application(s) and then restoring backups, which is a far more involved process than re-racking and assigning new IPs to a machine.