This is hilarious. Todd Hoff on the Amazon outage:
“Be a really big customer so Amazon* will help you specifically with your problems. This seemed to help Heroku a lot. I noticed in the Amazon developer forums a lot of people forgot to do this and didn’t get the personal help they needed.”
* it’s true for all vendors.
Spot on, mate! I’m not joking, this is rule number one: paid support isn’t worth squat unless you’re a big customer – and by big I mean big enough to sue and win. Or to make the jolt of pain go right to the top if you vote with your money and switch vendors. Even then try to avoid vendor lock-in at all costs. And stop outsourcing your entire infrastructure while you’re at it.