Building infrastructure on top of Amazon with global replication across multiple availability zones can sidestep such failures and guarantee uninterrupted operations to customers - www.pubnub.com is unaffected by AWS being down.
SSL is certainly important for a lot of apps handling sensitive data (as well as AES: http://blog.pubnub.com/pubnub-adds-cross-platform-aes-symmet...). It of course has to (and does) work seamlessly with PubNub Channel Presence, Message History and other features of the real-time messaging infrastructure. The key to providing an affordable pay-as-you-go pricing plan is scale, whereby fixed costs of the globally-deployed messaging infrastructure are amortized across thousands of apps, millions of concurrent users and billions of sent and received messages: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pubnub-cloud-exceeds-1-million.... More info available at help.pubnub.com FAQs.