[kuon]

I manage about 500 servers. Critical services like DNS, mail, tftp, monitoring, routing, firewall... are all running openbsd in N+1 configuration, and in 15 years we had zero issue with that.

Now most servers are app servers, and they all run archlinux. We prepare images and we run them with PXE.

Both those are out of scope for self host.

But, we also have about a dozen of staging, dev, playground servers. And those are just regular installs of arch. We run postgres, redis, apps in many languages... For all that we use systems packages and AUR. DB upgrade? Zfs snapshot, and I follow arch wiki postgres upgrade, takes a few minutes, there is downtime, but it is fine. You mess anything? Zfs rollback. You miss a single file? cd .zfs/snapshots and grab it. I get about 30minutes of cumulated downtime per year on those machines. That's way enough for any self host.

We use arch because we try the latest "toys" on those. If you self host take an LTS distribution and you'll be fine.