I think it sort of depends on what you want. Every time I deploy a service it goes down for anything between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. When I switch indices,

I think it sort of depends on what you want. Every time I deploy a service it goes down for anything between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. When I switch indices, the entire search engine is down for a day or more. Since the entire project is essentially non-commercial, I think this is fine. I don't need five nines. If reliability was extremely important, scales would tilt differently, maybe cloud would be a good option. A lot of it is for CYA's sake as well. If I mess up with my server, that's both my problem and my responsibility. If a cloud provider messes up, then that's a SLA violation and maybe damages are due.