I've had so much more downtime with heroku/AWS than I ever had back when I was running my sites on slicehost.
I also feel like I've let my admin skills deteriorate because I've been dependent on heroku. Back when I was running everything myself, worst case scenario I could set up a new VPS from a backup in another datacenter. Now if heroku goes out I just have to twiddle my thumbs while I wait for updates.
I understand what you are saying. I host most of my projects on Rackspace. I've been intending to convert current ideas to Heroku because learning SysAdmin stuff doesn't seem to have much upside potential. However, these multiple outages while Rackspace (seemingly) keeps chugging along are discouraging. That being said, every Heroku outage makes front page of HN, and there could have been Rackspace downtimes much more often that I didn't notice.
Eh, I'll probably continue converting to Heroku and not look back.
I haven't see any RS-wide outages in my datacenter (IAD) for many years (I vaguely remember some networking issue, but that was something like 5 years back).
So they have their infrastructure (network, power) working very well.
The downtime we've had were our own unique hardware/software issues that come with a complex bare metal installation.
I also feel like I've let my admin skills deteriorate because I've been dependent on heroku. Back when I was running everything myself, worst case scenario I could set up a new VPS from a backup in another datacenter. Now if heroku goes out I just have to twiddle my thumbs while I wait for updates.