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 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.

I think you misread OP. "Single point of failure" doesn't mean the only failure modes are hardware failures. It means that if something happens to your nodes whether it's hardware failure or power outage or someone stumbling on your power/network cable, or even having a single service crashing, this means you have a major outage on your hands.

These types of outages are trivially avoided with a basic understanding of well-architected frameworks, which explicitly address the risk represented by single points of failure.

don't you think it's highly unlikely that someone will stumble over the power cable in a hosted datacenter like hetzner? and even if, you could just run a provisioned secondary server that jumps in if the first becomes unavailable and still be much cheaper.