In 2012, outages hit cloud hosting companies with regularity, creating a sense that they are no longer extraordinary events, but rather a normal part of the cloud computing business model.

Best practices now call for customers to enter into redundant service contracts to ensure backup service.

Continued outages have contributed to the feeling that businesses shouldn't put their core assets in a public cloud, and as a result, cloud vendors in 2012 ramped up sales of hybrid cloud services, enabling companies to manage their own private clouds.

Continue on and see some of the biggest cloud outages of the year.