Bizarre way of making decisions.

us-east-2 is objectively a better region to pick if you want US east, yet you feel safer picking use1 because “I’m safer making a worse decision that everyone understands is worse, as long as everyone else does it as well.”

If my cloud provider goes down and my site is offline, my customers and my boss will be upset with me and demand I fix it as fast as possible. They will not care what caused it.

If my cloud provider goes down and also takes down Spotify, Snapchat, Venmo, Reddit, and a ton of other major services that my customers and my boss use daily, they will be much more understanding that there is a third party issue that we can more or less wait out.

Every provider has outages. US-east-2 will sometimes go down. If I'm not going to make a system that can fail over from one provider to another (which is a lot of work and can be expensive, and really won't be actively used often), it might be better to just use the popular one and go with the group.

It's about risk profile. The question isn't "which region goes down the least" but "how often will I be blamed for an outage."

If you never get blamed for a US east outage, that's better than us-east-2 if that could get you blamed 0.5% of the time when it goes down and us1 isn't down or etc

I also don’t understand this.

US-East-2 staying up isn’t my responsibility. If I need my own failover, I’m going to select a different region anyway.

And it’s not like US-East-2 isn’t already huge and growing. It’s effectively becoming another US-East-1.