1) because AWS East is so much cheaper (and none of us like spending money) 2) AppFog actually is multi region (and multi IaaS as well)

Oregon is same as AWS East, seems to have a smaller set of boxes, have gotten errors in the past about not having any more servers to allocate.

Same in that they are both AWS and sometimes generate errors - yes. Not the same in that East has had four significant outages in the last 16 months and West has not.

I'd tolerate multi-AZ as a baseline.

Thanks for AppFog -- I hadn't heard of them, but will check them out.