If you are not using cloud services just virtual machines that's rarely worth it. And for a lot of people renting dedicated servers is the best business decisio

If you are not using cloud services just virtual machines that's rarely worth it. And for a lot of people renting dedicated servers is the best business decision. It can be so much cheaper than EC2 that you solve your normal scalability problem by simply having a large amount of excess capacity. As you grow, some dedicated providers will give you an API to spin up a server in <120 seconds so even adding capacity quickly becomes possible. If your load is extremely spikey then this is not going to work but most people doesn't deal with loads like that -- or have other mitigation strategies. Always keep an eye on your business goals and not on the hype. For oneuptime obviously downtime is a huge problem but you'd be surprised for how many businesses it's much cheaper to be down for a few minutes here and there than engineering a complex HA mechanism. The aforementioned spiking problem often can be solved cheaply by degrading the hot pages to static and serving them from CDN (if you have a mechanism for doing this of course). And so forth. Remember KISS.