My experience is: Downtime does matter. Customers ignore downtime when you're a service with big lock-in or no real alternative (GitHub, Facebook, etc). Becaus

My experience is: Downtime does matter. Customers ignore downtime when you're a service with big lock-in or no real alternative (GitHub, Facebook, etc). Because then they can't do anything about it. When you're a small/medium service, and you're down for 3 hours during a time where 4 employees of a company need you for productive work, they ask what's up, and if they must expect that this will happen again. Generally, shorter, one-off downtimes are forgiven, but longer or recurring ones are not. We run on Hetzner dedicated, and I think the best way to run most sensible software is to run on 3 or 5 beefy machines. If you only have 1 machine, the following will take you down, all of which have happened in my production systems (except the last, which I only read about in the news for 3 hosters): * You need to reboot for kernel security updates. A reboot causes 3 minutes downtime because that's how long a reboot takes on server hardware, including Hetzner's (multiple POST style screens, netboot timeouts and so on, most of which make sense). Kernel updates come in approximately every 3 weeks. You may skip some of them that are not security-relevant for you, but this requires careful analysis, which is more effort than just installing. * The mainboard dies. It needs to be replaced. Immediately causes 3 hours of downtime. * Some disk or RAM dies in a way that prevents the mainboard from booting. This should not happen, but it does. Also 3 hours of downtime. * One of these happens at 1 am on Saturday. You are in Europe or Asia. If you are not set up to be paged out of bed, your US customer will see 8 hours of downtime. * The top-of-rack or datacenter building core router has some trouble, and it takes the hoster 3 hours to fix it. 3 hours of downtime. * There's a fire or sprinkler flooding in your data center. It takes the hoster 2 weeks to clean up the physical mess. 2 weeks of downtime, unless you manage to re-build the infra somewhere else and restore from backups, then maybe 48 hours of downtime. Note most of this also applies if you run a single VM in AWS. If you're lucky, the restore times will be faster by being a VM. But that is not guaranteed; I've had instances not do their work for some hours and afterwards got the email "We noticed a problem with the physical host of your VM, we've automatically migrated it somewhere else now". Most of these problems go away if you have 3 servers (of the type the original post describes) instead of one, which is only slightly more effort.