is it true that Amazon’s EC2 clouds had some failure that lead to a permanent data loss?
There have, in the past, been problms with Amazon’s Cloud solution, I’m not sure if it has lead to data loss though.
No matter what hosting platform you are on, there is always the risk for SOME problems.
i thought clouds would be the next big thing… how sad, i’m now having doubts of choosing a cloud server over a dedicated server if everything else would be just the same.
There is no reason thye can’t work for you - they just don’t work for everyone in every instance. It really depends how you set things up / how you want to work 
Yes, earlier this year there was a failure that resulted in permanent loss of data on a very small percentage of EBS snapshots.
As for ‘clouds being the next big thing’ there’s a direct correlation between amount of media hype, and the amount of under-qualified hosting companies moving in to this market to grab share. Cloud hosting is now only second to SEO in terms of being a web service attracting BS product and marketing, so the chances are high that you’ll see further failures of cloud resilience in the future.
Every computer, or system of computers, will at some point be subject to some degree of failure. Why would EC2 be any different? The difference between the failure on EC2 and other systems however is that with EC2 it tends to be less frequent and more easily/quickly recoverable.
From what I understand, if EC2 customers were seeking High Availability they should have also had a second region/zone defined; as suggested by Amazon.
That is correct - and the same of pretty much any hosting scenario, if you want to make sure your site is always up, you host it in multiple locations.
Multiple location is a good way for the OP to have their business online for 24 hours and avoid any losses.