I'm looking at transitioning from a dedicated hosting provide to Amazon's EC2 instances. The website is an asp/asp.net website with SQL Server 2008 as it's backend. It has zero redundancy as is besides the 24 hardware replacement we have in the contract.
My question is, transitioning to Amazon's EC2 instance would provide the same level, or lack of redundancy, but with the large outage a few months back I was wondering what my option would be to prevent any lengthily downtime by some feature of Amazon EC2 without setting up a full-time replication agent in another EC2 zone or center. The cost of the SQL instance alone is ~$800 minimum, so having two would throw me over the budget easily. The database size is 35gb so it's not to big, but also much larger then SQL Express can handle.
Thoughts?