The ROI on keeping a personal blog up at 5 9s is awful... I understand the desire from a geeky perspective, but it's only really useful for personal enjoyment of the challenge, or bragging.
That's almost certainly lower than combining reputable VPS providers geo-redundantly, and likely a much higher cost for the "convenience".
And it's not just for geeky pride. You learn the most when things break. Far too many funded startups run poorly architected apps in a single AWS EZ, unlike GP.
Off by 6 orders of magnitude: actually 10,000 rps sustained for a few hours (2,500 page hit/sec × 4 req per page). These are my—admitedly very rare—peaks when the blog gets slashdotted.
