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I agree not every website needs high availability... but I wouldn't bet my $600k/yr business on a single VM's availability and reliability. One day, his server

I agree not every website needs high availability... but I wouldn't bet my $600k/yr business on a single VM's availability and reliability. One day, his server is going to die and be replaced by his host, or his disks will need replacing or a RAID array will fry... It seems like his business could at least afford an HA setup on a cloud provider. Moving to any hosted db with backups, updates and redundancy could be worth it. As for HA failing, it's still less likely than not-HA failing. Also an HA setup allows for maintenance and upgrades without downtime, which is way better than the very common "we don't upgrade if it's working, because it could break".

WJW 6y ago
Running on a single server does not mean no backups and uptime monitoring is in place. If the hardware fails, you get a ping on the channel of your choice, manually provision a new VM then download the latest sqlite backup from your backup provider. Easy to make a checklist or a script for this, too. Also there is a third option between HA (with its increased cost and complexity) and "we don't upgrade if it's working, because it could break", which is "take the site down for a few minutes, do the upgrade, bring it back up". It's not for every site, but there's a range of sites for which that is fine.