Note that EC2 isn't in their critical path: it's a prep stage rather than serving directly to the masses.

We do use EC2 for cron, but could easily use a laptop instead if there were an outage.

Some of our more dynamic projects do require a server; the inauguration project that uploaded photos to Tumblr did, for example. https://github.com/nprapps/inauguration/

When we run servers, it's usually Flask and Nginx/uWSGI.