I run Django apps on AWS and two other VPS providers and I wouldn't walk away from Amazon because of this outage. Amazon have some great features that collectively aren't available as a package elsewhere.

My tip would be to host the db and app server on a single instance to start with (less things to go wrong), and assume that server will fail.

Have a warm standby either in another AWS region or (like us) with a completely different provider. And make sure you have several copies of your data available to restore if need be. (For this I use dirvish on yet another VPS provider).

Finally, test your failover / restore procedure on a fairly regular basis.

My email is in my profile. Feel free to ping me if you have any specific questions.