[Spivak]

I mean my current company got our first million users with four used poweredge nodes and two database servers. Since we were using bargain basement equipment we were extremely paranoid about hardware failure and so every little aspect of our app was built to handle 2 whole nodes failing simultaneously and every service running on those boxes in VMs was two-failure redundant as well.

I mean ops isn't simple no matter where you're hosting it but it's not any harder than when I worked at AWS shops.