Not surprised to see this, although I am surprised more companies aren't following suit. We abandoned AWS a year and a half ago and cut our server / infrastructure costs by 90% in the process.
Nothing reserved because we never wanted to be tied to the platform for long, although we ended up staying on longer than I wanted to due to difficulties in migrating away.
Yes, I realize we could have saved a lot with longer contracts. But the costs would still have been much higher than what we're paying now.
RDS crashed (completely) for us 2 years in a row, on exactly July 4th. We never got a straight answer from Amazon and their support system is a nightmare. Performance was always an issue.
Our main servers are now hosted on Hetzner (surprisingly).
We've had issues here and there with individual machine performance but nothing catastrophic and their customer service has been good.
For redundancy, we replicate back to the US onto Rackspace (and small EC2 instances for additional redundancy) servers and can switch over completely if need be.
We were worried that latency (because servers are in Germany) would be an issue but it hasn't. Also, in addition to US customers, we have a lot of customers in Japan so it doesn't seem to make much difference.
It's probably not for everybody and it's certainly not "cool" but it's worked very well for us.
Edit: our needs are relatively inelastic, which obviously makes AWS a poor choice to begin with. That was something we learned a little later in life as a startup.