Oregon is same as AWS East, seems to have a smaller set of boxes, have gotten errors in the past about not having any more servers to allocate.
Same in that they are both AWS and sometimes generate errors - yes. Not the same in that East has had four significant outages in the last 16 months and West has not.
I'd tolerate multi-AZ as a baseline.
Thanks for AppFog -- I hadn't heard of them, but will check them out.