OTOH, when your company's web site is down you can do something about it. When the CEO asks about it, you can explain why its offline and more importantly what is being done to bring it back.

The equivalent situation for those who took a cloud based approach is often... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

With the cloud, in a lot of cases you can have additional regions that incur very little cost as they scale dynamically with traffic. It’s hard to do that with on-prem. Also many AWS services come cross-AZ (AZ is a data center), so their arch is more robust than a single Colo server even if you’re in a single region.

Cross region from on-prem to the cloud for a website is easy. In fact, as long as you don't buy into "cloud native" ("cloud lock-in"?), it's probably more cost effective than two on-prem regions or two cloud regions.

Being able to choose from so many different Availability Zones in so many different regions is one of the best things about AWS. Combined with sophisticated routing strategies that Route 53 supports allows for some very effective designs.

The more relevant question is whether my efforts to do something lead to a better and faster result than my cloud providers efforts to do something. I get it - it feels powerless to do nothing, but for a lot of organizations I’ve seen the average downtime would still be higher.

I worked in IT for a state government and they had a partial outage of their Exchange server that lasted over 2 weeks. It triggered a full migration to Exchange online.

Hey boss, I go to sleep now, site should be up anytime. Cheers

When AWS goes down you can tell your boss that dozens of people are working to get it back up.

It's not always a full availability zone going down that is the problem. Also, despite the "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" logic, in practice I've never actually found stakeholders to be reassured by "its AWS and everyone is affected" when things are down. People want things back up and they want some informed answers about when that might happen, not "ehh its AWS, out of our control".

When there's little trust between the business and IT, both are incentivized to move to the cloud.

It's harder to build trust than the opposite.