"reasonable cost?" The "reasonable cost" is a good point of course. Also relative to what they are able to charge and how that would change their business mode

"reasonable cost?" The "reasonable cost" is a good point of course. Also relative to what they are able to charge and how that would change their business model. One type of customer might be willing to pay for a more robust service, others wouldn't. Take any garden variety website hosting service where the charge is under $10 per month and try to operate it giving better uptime and charging, say, $20 per month and see your customer base vanish. People expect it to work 24x7 but aren't willing to pay for it. They would rather take their chances. That said one thing they might be able to do at a "reasonable" cost is simply spread their customer base over multiple data centers. So the failure of one would only bring down a smaller percentage of their customers.