Nobody in this thread ever claimed it was better for the users. It's better for the people involved in the decision.

You have to consider the class of problems as a whole, from the perspective of management:

- The cheap solution would be equally good, and it's just a blame shifting game.

- The cheap solution is worse, and paying more for the name brand gets you more reliability.

There are many situations that fall into the second category, and anyone running a business probably has personal memories of making the second mistake. The problem is, if you're not up to speed on the nitty gritty technical details of a tradeoff, you can't tell the difference between the first category and the second. So you accept that sometimes you will over-spend for "no reason" as a cost of doing business. (But the reason is that information and trust don't come for free.)

This excuse only works for one or maybe two such outages in most orgs

> non-technical people

It's also better for the technical people. If you self host the DB goes down at 2am on a Sunday morning all the technical people are gonna get woken up and they will be working on it until it's fixed.

If us-east goes down a technical person will be woken up, they'll check downdetector.com, and they'll say "us-east is down, nothin' we can do" and go back to sleep.