I was scared to move the cloud for this reason. I was used to running to the server room and the KVM if things went south. If that was frozen, usually unplugging the server physically from the switch would get it calm down.

Now Amazon supports a direct console interface like KVM and you can virtually unplug virtual servers from their virtual servers too.

I started to DBAN (wipe) my internal drive once instead of an attached drive. That was the last time I ran DBAN on a machine with any drives of value plugged in.