Comparing Techcrunch to Google is a bit lopsided, don't you think? Operations for most websites is like vehicle maintenance for a pizza delivery company: essential for success, but hardly their "core competency". This is especially true if the website is something relatively standard like a blog or news site. It takes quite a bit of scale and customization before it makes sense to hire full-time dedicated sysadmins.
If you don't need a full time operations engineer, you should become competent as a part-time one. Both Google and Techcrunch share the fact that they have paying advertisers who expect their site to be up and delivering their content.
Would you fly on an airline that treated their aircraft maintenance the same way? So why would you expect advertisers to run their ads on sites that don't have a person who understands the application carrying a pager?
