It's not clear to me why you need a distributed database in the first place. If it's just for general purpose small scale projects, does it really matter if you

It's not clear to me why you need a distributed database in the first place. If it's just for general purpose small scale projects, does it really matter if your database is down once a year? I run a couple of Postgres databases on cheap linux VMs, for various projects, and they have been running smoothly for years. The only problem I had was two times when the disk was full. If I had multiple nodes they would all have been full... Github has been down more often than my Postgres databases. HA adds so much complexity and tradeoffs that I would really think hard about wether it's worth it for your use case.