> If you're a amateur something, that just does it for fun - sure

  sed "s/amateur/comparatively poor, from a third world country, without VC money, or have cheap labor/g"

Not everyone can afford advanced tools or platforms, or even using something like AWS/Azure/GCP. Some of those can indeed be amateur use cases (e.g. side project or bootstrapped SaaS), others simply stretching your money for any number of considerations (e.g. non profit, limited budget etc.), but it's definitely possible. In some countries it probably makes more sense to just build your own solution, as long as you're not doing anything too advanced.

500 USD a month would get you approximately the following resources (taxes vary) on the aforementioned platforms:

  Contabo
  Nodes: 15 to 83 (depending on configuration)
  CPU: 150 to 332 cores
  RAM: 664 to 900 GB
  SSD: 4150 to 6000 GB
  
  Hetzner
  Nodes: 7 to 110 (depending on configuration)
  CPU: 86 to 192 cores
  RAM: 192 to 384 GB
  SSD: 2200 to 4800 GB
  
  (this includes regular VPS packages, not storage optimized ones, or dedicated hosting etc.)

I'm not sure about you, but in my experience that could be enough for some pretty decent systems, albeit some storage heavy workloads would need the storage packages instead of the regular VPS ones. It's mostly a matter of picking a suitable topology and working towards your goals.

> Otherwise what you have is a budget that is lower than the possible implications of temporary downtime. That doesn't make sense in the real world.

This (depending on the circumstances) does sound like a good point! Maybe "the real world" isn't the best wording, though, and choosing "enterprise settings" or anything along those lines would be more suitable.

I could probably design and deploy an HA system for way less. Maybe less than $200/month. It wouldn't be the most performant, but would be HA in three regions.

But it leads me back to my original statement - extreme requirements for uptime don't come out of nothing.

If you're in a location where IT related labor is extremely cheap - you're just going to have people keep one server up.

I know I used to do exactly that, because the server was more than my annual income. But that didn't last long. After the first 20 minute downtime, the budget for HA solution was allocated. But before a certain point downtime wasn't expensive.

Non-profits would probably be the only reasonable exception, where HA and low budgets could coincide. Otherwise - nah...

Those are all fair points, perhaps even more so given the trend of compute and other resources generally becoming more cheap with time (things like Wirth's law and limited IPv6 support aside), thanks for expanding on your arguments!

>> Otherwise what you have is a budget that is lower than the possible implications of temporary downtime. That doesn't make sense in the real world.

> Maybe "the real world" isn't the best wording, though, and choosing "enterprise settings" or anything along those lines would be more suitable.

This is the point - for-profit corporations, by definition, don't want to waste money, and if "high reliability" isn't required (or they don't know about it), they don't waste money. Most of the time, they don't waste the money.

However, if "being cheap" would means billions in lost income (and they know about it), they really want to have reliable, redundant infrastructure and systems around.