[fragmede]

But hard drive failures are why you pay a cloud company with live migrate (ie not AWS) for their service. The physical hardware the machine is running on will eventually fail, as you note, but the VM will keep on ticking on basically forever * and you'd never know the hard drive/SSD underneath it failed.

* Live migrate won't upgrade the CPU family you're running on, so eventually someone/a something on your end will be forced to deal with migrating it, but that's O(years).