Yesterday, Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service went down for the second time this year, bringing a swathe of web 2.0 sites down with it. Sites and apps like SmugMug, Twhirl, Twitter, and SlideShare were all affected by the downtime. As WebWorkerDaily notes, Amazon’s SLA guarantees 99.9% uptime — or about no more than 45 minutes downtime per month. So it’s a safe bet that Amazon will owe a bunch of sites refunds for this most recent hours-long outage.

For many users of Amazon’s or other cloud storage services, however, downtime is unacceptable and can cost the business more than just the price of that missed hosting. Travel guide startup Planaroo, which was also negatively affected by the S3 outage, penned a post on their company blog today outlining what they learned from the issues with Amazon. Here are their takeaways [...]