>> With numerous incurred problems with the service, the only resort was to go to the Google Groups and beg for help and attention

Same for Amazon unless you pay them for the premium support which started at $48/month for 12 hours response time. (in contrast, I don't need to pay extra for my Linode's support and they usually response within a few minutes.)

If you are interested, visit AWS forum and search "reboot help" [1]

[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/search.jspa?q=reboot+help&...