In the last week I had two outages.
One was this failure. I got immediately notified about the Anvil failure on my app by UptimeRobot and I got an explanation on the forum.
Fortunately this happened during the night, so my users were not affected and no one called me.
The other was a Google Map service returning NOT_FOUND as the distance between two zip codes for about 30 minutes. I would expect better redundancy and reliability from Google, instead I got calls from clients that couldn’t place an order. My logs show the call returning NOT_FOUND for about 30 minutes, then they got the correct value. There was no way for me to know about the failure (I can’t possibly setup an UptimeRobot for every pair of zipcodes!), I didn’t get any explanation from Google and it lasted longer than the Anvil failure.
In this case a client called because couldn’t place an order on the ecommerce website.
I am not denying that Anvil has more issues than the typical provider. My point is that there is no provider that is 100% reliable and that the benefits provided by Anvil’s development far outweigh the downtime.
Obviously my point of view applies to my use case: single developer maintaining apps mostly for internal use (some, like the one with http endpoints used by the ecommerce is used also by external users) and your requirements may be different.