if your data isn't very important, by all means, keep it on someone elses virtualized infrastructure with no performance or reliability guarantees.
Well that’s not quite fair. AWS guarantees performance for those instances (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instances.html#i2-instances-diskperf). They also guarantee their instances will fail sooner or later, with or without warning (at which point you will loose all your data unless you’ve been putting copies onto a different system).
