[whalesalad]

Why is Metal not offered for single instance deploys? Our app does not need this kind of uptime. We would be happy with a node going down once in a while (no data loss, of course) with a little bit of downtime to save 66% on the cost of running 2 additional nodes that will never see action.

[samlambert]

It's a durability thing, we need to make sure writes are replicated off to at least one node. There might be avenues to get Metal down to single node in the future.

[solatic]

I definitely think there are use-cases out there which are fine with daily backups. Not every use-case requires high availability or high durability.

Even to take a case in point where durability is irrelevant - people building caches in Postgres (so as to only have one datastore / not need Redis as well). Not a big deal if the cache blows up - just force everyone to login again. Would love to see the vendor reduce complexity on their end and pass through the savings to the customer.

edit: per your other reply re. using replication to handle resizing, maybe being upfront with customers about additional latency / downtime being necessary with single-node discounts, then for resizing you could break connections, take a backup, then restore the backup on a resized node?