"[I]n no way the same"? Either one reduces my profit for the year by $50,000. One comes out of revenue, the other comes out of cash on hand (or increases debt, as the case may be). Yes, there are trade-offs and differing side effects from the situations, but they are similar in their effect on the bottom line.

Also, losing $50,000 in business because of a supplier or subcontractor failure is not an opportunity cost.

Correct on both counts. Ultimately, if you lose $50,000 in revenue to an outage it is at least partially your fault. Whether you want the direct control of the entire cluster in exchange for the extra responsibility is an individual choice. My point is that offering to rebate a trivial amount of money in that case is pretty meaningless. Hell, I think its meaningless even if you have full redundancy and don't suffer any actual losses. I certainly don't see it as a perk of cloud providers.