I don't agree with the parent either (I'd rather use a SaaS if it makes sense) its also not as easy as you make it sound. For starters, most smallish companies

I don't agree with the parent either (I'd rather use a SaaS if it makes sense) its also not as easy as you make it sound. For starters, most smallish companies I know of use housing for their servers. So, they actually do own the hard metal servers and have full access to them. Both over SSH and on the console for debugging purposes. The housing provider generally replaces HDDs in case of disk failures. naturally, you're still dependent on electricity and internet, but even that can be mitigated by spreading your servers across several locations. All of that is obviously possible with AWS, GCP or other VPS hosts, but doing it yourself is not that much harder if you've got an experienced ops person that wants to bother with all of that. but i repeat... Its often not worth the time investment to get that system properly set up. Just renting VMs or going straight into dockerized microservices is an increasingly better alternative