Use One Big Server (2022)

Don't forget the cost of managing your one big server and the risk of having such single point of failure.

My experience after 20 years in the hosting industry is that customers in general have more downtime due to self-inflicted over-engineered replication, or split brain errors than actual hardware failures. One server is the simplest and most reliable setup, and if you have backup and automated provisioning you can just re-deploy your entire environment in less than the time it takes to debug a complex multi-server setup.

I'm not saying everybody should do this. There are of-course a lot of services that can't afford even a minute of downtime. But there is also a lot of companies that would benefit from a simpler setup.

My single on-premise Exchange server is drastically more reliable than Microsoft's massive globally resilient whatever Exchange Online, and it costs me a couple hours of work on occasion. I probably have half their downtime, and most of mine is scheduled when nobody needs the server anyhow.

I'm not a better engineer, I just have drastically fewer failure modes.

Do you develop and manage the server alone? It's a quite a different reality when you have a big team.