[CodingGuy]

You just have to build high-availability into your software. I'm using six Hetzner servers for over 1.5 years now and the only problem I had was one disk failure - support needed 10 minutes to swap it. I can highly recommend them! I pay them ~200 euros per month for what would cost me 2.000+ dollars on aws...

[iofj]

I'm curious about this statement : is that as opposed to cloud apps ? Wouldn't you need to build high-availability into your apps whether they're running in the cloud or on dedicated ?

If you mean that you can have a load balancer in front of it managed by Amazon, that's true for dedicated as well (Akamai, CDNetworks, Limelight, even Leaseweb). Managed databases are available from most providers (usually without an API, but you can find them with an API as well).