I don't run a tinpot site but I am the sole developer managing a couple web servers and services for my company. Our db failure works much like you described.

I don't run a tinpot site but I am the sole developer managing a couple web servers and services for my company. Our db failure works much like you described. Maybe a .5ms added latency if that regardless of physical location more like .1ms from our metrics. Every quarter we test it, and without fail, it has worked. So I added maybe a couple hours of research and two minutes of additional configurations during set up for reliably fast failover. Seems pretty no brainer to me. When we moved to a managed instance with our cloud provider it took even less time to set up failover, maybe 30 seconds. With the numerous options for cloud offerings these days I see no reason to not have a failover set up whether you are a massive corporation or a small business.