[weddpros]

I agree not every website needs high availability... but I wouldn't bet my $600k/yr business on a single VM's availability and reliability. One day, his server is going to die and be replaced by his host, or his disks will need replacing or a RAID array will fry...

It seems like his business could at least afford an HA setup on a cloud provider. Moving to any hosted db with backups, updates and redundancy could be worth it.

As for HA failing, it's still less likely than not-HA failing.

Also an HA setup allows for maintenance and upgrades without downtime, which is way better than the very common "we don't upgrade if it's working, because it could break".

[WJW]

Running on a single server does not mean no backups and uptime monitoring is in place. If the hardware fails, you get a ping on the channel of your choice, manually provision a new VM then download the latest sqlite backup from your backup provider. Easy to make a checklist or a script for this, too.

Also there is a third option between HA (with its increased cost and complexity) and "we don't upgrade if it's working, because it could break", which is "take the site down for a few minutes, do the upgrade, bring it back up". It's not for every site, but there's a range of sites for which that is fine.