Why We're Moving Off Amazon's (AWS) Servers

It's no mystery that the tech industry and big business see artists, fans, and independent live event spaces as a commodity. What we want is infrastructure that answers to you and cares about the needs of the industry. That idea shaped how we built VenuePilot. This year, it's shaping how we're hosting it too.

It's also no mystery that Amazon is too big. Besides being the largest online reseller, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is also the largest cloud provider of infrastructure for software. Amazon itself says more than 90% of Fortune 100 companies rely on its partner network. That kind of concentration used to be treated as a feature: one company, endlessly reliable, too big to have a bad day. I'm less convinced of that lately.

In the past year, Amazon cut roughly 30,000 jobs and leaned harder into AI to help build and run its own systems. One story stood out to me. In December 2025, an internal AI coding tool was assigned a routine bug fix inside one of AWS's own products. Instead of a small patch, it deleted the entire thing and tried to rebuild it from scratch. No human signed off. The system was down for 13 hours, and Amazon didn't disclose what happened until a report surfaced it two months later. It's a strange, specific kind of failure, the kind you get when a company cuts headcount and hands more control to automation in the same breath. A few months after that, Amazon's own retail site went dark for six hours, checkout, pricing, accounts, all down, with internal emails pointing to a "trend of incidents" tied to rushed AI-assisted changes.

The only reason to stick with a behemoth like Amazon would be if there was a real upside big enough to outweigh all of this, and I don't think there is.

That's why we're moving VenuePilot's hosting to Fly.io. It's an independent company, not a subsidiary of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, and it runs on hardware it owns instead of renting space inside someone else's cloud. Fly.io also publishes its incidents publicly, including the ones that don't go well, instead of quietly patching things and moving on. Transparency. I like that.

What this means for you

The move itself will take about an hour, on Monday, July 13th, from 6:00 to 7:00am ET

If you have questions or comments, reach out, I'm around.