Honestly, it's not FC vs. self-hosted, it's FC vs. an alternate product.
Preferably one not locate in a hurricane path, flood plain, earthquake zone, fire area, landslide track, or subject to political or economic instability.
Or highly redundant with tested failover paths.
All of which costs money, and still doesn't assure reliability. Look at last week's AWS EBS outage and root cause analysis: the service was brought down by its own monitoring (exacerbating an existing memory bug).
It's not easy. Sandy is the most extreme hurricane to hit NYC in a century (though the second in as many years). NYC is a sufficiently important commerce and financial hub to have excellent services and recovery capabilities, but it still isn't immune to perturbations.
Preferably one not locate in a hurricane path, flood plain, earthquake zone, fire area, landslide track, or subject to political or economic instability.
Or highly redundant with tested failover paths.
All of which costs money, and still doesn't assure reliability. Look at last week's AWS EBS outage and root cause analysis: the service was brought down by its own monitoring (exacerbating an existing memory bug).
It's not easy. Sandy is the most extreme hurricane to hit NYC in a century (though the second in as many years). NYC is a sufficiently important commerce and financial hub to have excellent services and recovery capabilities, but it still isn't immune to perturbations.