> any of a dozen components could fail and bring the box down permanently The same is true with VPS and "cloud" setups. As the OVH fire last year showed, offsi

> any of a dozen components could fail and bring the box down permanently The same is true with VPS and "cloud" setups. As the OVH fire last year showed, offsite backups are not a luxury. The chances of that, though, are ridiculously low. Higher-end dedicated hosts have very low failure rates due to using higher-grade hardware and rotating the hardware every few years; they also usually have very competent and available technicians on site which are paid by your monthly bill. > If it was one virtual machine I'd say, sure, just use one box, you can bring up a new one automated in 10 minutes. The same is true with dedicated servers. If you house them yourself then sure bringing up hardware replacement is going to take longer. But if you use a managed dedicated hosting solution (as was mentioned in the article) the provisioning times are sensibly similar to that of a VPS (a few minutes).