The choice is not only serverless or hosting on bare metal - there are a lot of options in between. You can hire VMs and have the vendor transparently deal with hardware faults for example without downtime. Running your own VMs doesn’t mean running your own hardware.
The original claim is not at all unrealistic, I’ve been running a small shop with about 20 VMs without issues for years, uptime seems to me about comparable with serverless or hosted services from big players who regularly have small outages and there really is very little work involved.
The original claim is not at all unrealistic, I’ve been running a small shop with about 20 VMs without issues for years, uptime seems to me about comparable with serverless or hosted services from big players who regularly have small outages and there really is very little work involved.