Because we want to be colo with everybody else that's on us-east-1. It makes for lower latency, higher transfers, and when shit hits the fan none of your customers notice that your SaaS product is down because they can't access their entire site!

> It's really puzzling why everyone keeps hosting their projects in us-east-1.

I've been using Amazon for 4 years, and this is the first time I hear their us-east-1 is more "cutting edge" and less reliable than all the other zones. This isn't even listed on their page describing these zones: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-reg...

The AWS Global Infrastructure guide to all the Regions is pretty informative. When you look at the table here[1], you realize pretty quickly that every idea that AWS has ever had gets an initial deployment in Northern Virginia (us-east-1).

It's also one of the reasons why so many people continue to use it. If you really need one of these services for your infrastructure, then your very likely going to be stuck using us-east-1. It may be quite some time before you get a 2nd region.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio...

Of course it's not listed. They're not going to say "this is our first region and it runs on some pretty old hardware and hacked together configurations so we recommend you don't use it."

It's pretty common knowledge that us-east-1 is the most unreliable region. Also the oldest which helps explain why.

I agree its "common knowledge" but is it true? Or is it just a case that because 80+% (made up) of everyone hosts in us-east-1, thats the only one we hear about in HN (and other sites) threads?

I go by the outage reports published by AWS. I haven't done an exhaustive analysis but there is a trend to support the common knowledge. I spend most of my time in us-west-1 and us-west-2 and very few if any outages over the past 3 years.

I think you answered your own question. In the case of AWS, sometimes being "bleeding edge" means you're allowing amazon to scaffold infrastructure with a new service that you'd otherwise have to deal with yourself. For a small company, an AWS service being bleeding edge is still a lot more resilient than doing it yourself.

I doubt that the vast majority of customers in us-east-1 are using bleeding edge services. By the time you figure out how to integrate some new AWS offering into your infrastructure it has probably been rolled out to the other regions and the kinks worked out. Unless you need latest and greatest GPU offerings for DL, in which case maybe.

Only two regions have good availability for AWS services.

For example, email (SES). Only Virgina and Oregon. And Oregon goes down too.

If all you needed was VPS, you'd probably find better offerings elsewhere.

us-east-1 pricing (for EC2, S3, etc.) is usually lower than other regions

Pricing between us-east-1 and us-west-2 has been largely the same in my experience. us-west-1 had a price premium, presumably due to higher costs in California.