(I'm one of the MongoHQ founders) It's less about the hardware and more about the DBA service. Most companies shouldn't be spending engineering time setting up

(I'm one of the MongoHQ founders) It's less about the hardware and more about the DBA service. Most companies shouldn't be spending engineering time setting up DBs and don't have the expertise to run them when they're "catastrophically successful". We do, know what the watch for, and have on call DBAs that respond to issues within about 10 minutes, 24x7.