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.