I've heard this before, but it's basically not true. You still have hardware problems, you're just paying to pretend they aren't there anymore. If you want to do that, it's OK, but we need to stop pretending that throwing money at a problem makes it go away.

> Yes, you could do this yourself but that would cost more and reduce the advantage.

Compared to AWS pricing? No thanks. I've yet to personally see a company save money by using AWS (ymmv of course).

> Even with redundant hot spare fail-over you will need to fix the hardware at some point and will be running at risk until you do.

Sure, but that's generally where you save your money. And if you do it right, it doesn't have to be at 4 am