Amazon's 'cloud' service, which is relied on by many serious organizations as the answer to down-time, was just down for as many as 24 hours. Not sure if this is true, but, according to TIME, some of the data Amazon hosts for its clients is lost forever. The largest Drupal hosting company, Acquia, which hosts over 40,000 Drupal websites, had to issue an embarrassing public apology to all their clients.

Now, I own a small software shop that hosts about 60 Drupal websites. Over and over again, people have told me that I should move my hosting to 'the cloud' or one day I would lose all of my clients when my server goes down. And if my server were down for 24 hours, and I lost some of my client's data, I would expect many of them to leave. Hell, I would leave. But, two years into hosting Drupal sites, my company's hosting has never been down for more than a couple minutes and 'the cloud' is proving to be much less reliable than traditional dedicated servers.

Maybe the owners of 'the cloud' you use will do a better job than you at backing up data and ensuring uptime. Or, maybe not. They certainly aren't making any promises:

We are not responsible for any data loss or data corruption [...]

People talk about the cloud like it is magical. The cloud is just a computer that you don't control. That should send chills down your spine if you are in charge of technology for an organization working for social justice and you rely on the cloud.

In short, so far: Ted 1, Cloud 0.