> vps provider goes away Backups. Your colo, cloud host, mail provider are equally likely to disappear. > hardware failure Unlikely to be a big issue unless

> vps provider goes away Backups. Your colo, cloud host, mail provider are equally likely to disappear. > hardware failure Unlikely to be a big issue unless you own your own kit and can't afford redundancy or replacement. Otherwise, it's a case of firing up another VM and restoring it as per any other computer. > User error Less likely to happen than on a hosted service from experience. I've seen massive data loss on a couple of big names. > Maintenance Seriously you just leave it. "apt-get upgrade". Perhaps some minor reconfiguration required between distro versions but I haven't had to do this in 5 years on Debian. Also don't forget, bar gross misconfiguration, if your mail server goes away even for a couple of days, email usually makes its way to you eventually anyway. It's quite resilient. As for backups, I always test restore at least once a month.