> Backups are still offsite, so if my place burns I'm just out on uptime
There are plenty of exceptions, but I generally find uptime is given way too much consideration for the value it gives. Most companies up to the national level generally only require about 12 hours a day of uptime from most of their software, more than that is a nice to have, but the company won't collapse if you turn off the servers overnight because no one is working anyway. Even a whole day outage of a critical system can just mean that work has to be delayed for a day and everyone has to work a bit harder the next day. Then as you move down the scale of importance outages can be much longer before people will even notice.
I've seen plenty of "5 nines" style requirements put forth but few that truly need it and even fewer that have considered the costs imposed by it.
Yeah, I find the constant focus on ~100% uptime a bit crazy.
I used to work for one of Australia's largest bookmakers and we would regularly switch off the datacenter overnight to do some work on the servers. It didn't seem to impact the growth of that business one bit. There were times of course where uptime equalled cash, it just wasn't all the time.
For my personal hobby projects, I would actually rather have downtime than a surprise bill if something gets popular.
There are plenty of exceptions, but I generally find uptime is given way too much consideration for the value it gives. Most companies up to the national level generally only require about 12 hours a day of uptime from most of their software, more than that is a nice to have, but the company won't collapse if you turn off the servers overnight because no one is working anyway. Even a whole day outage of a critical system can just mean that work has to be delayed for a day and everyone has to work a bit harder the next day. Then as you move down the scale of importance outages can be much longer before people will even notice.
I've seen plenty of "5 nines" style requirements put forth but few that truly need it and even fewer that have considered the costs imposed by it.