[Axsuul]

Sounds great. Yep, what I mean is you will need to make your systems fully redundant before considering cloud if your business depends on reliability and uptime. That usually requires the business to reach a certain scale first.

[sgarland]

Sure, but making something redundant is not really that difficult. HAProxy in front N nodes across M racks, ideally in separate DCs, and then a floating IP in front of your HAProxies. Set up hot standby for your DB.

I used to joke that my homelab almost had better reliability than any company I’d been at, save for my ISP’s spotty availability. Now that I have a failover WAN, it literally is more reliable. In the five years of running a rack, I’ve had precisely one catastrophic hardware failure (mobo died on a Supermicro). Even then, I had a standby node, so it was more of an annoyance (the standby ran hotter and louder) than anything.