[shrubble]

With (if using Postgres) WAL and log shipping, ZFS send/receive snapshots every minute, and other dead-simple setups, a single developer can easily protect against hardware failure, have solid backups, and unless using an absolutely horrific stack, can easily handle a very large amount of business with the hardware I have mentioned.

Have you ever worked with mediocre developers? Have you ever been responsible for a built-out implementation of the sort you are talking about?

And, have you ever actually run intensive tasks on hardware where you owned the entirety of the system and could have visibility into the full OS? (Many VM providers oversubscribe their CPU and RAM, and, you have no visibility into memory bandwidth performance either.)