> The thing most appealing about single server configs is the simplicity. The more simple a system easy, likely the more reliable and easy to understand.
I think you should always plan for failures, but modern enterprise hardware is quite reliable. I would even posit that if you stood up a brand new physical server today, it has a good chance of beating AWS uptime (well, not the AWS dashboard numbers) over a one year period.
Well you gotta have a backup strategy. I'm talking about the primary machine here, I assumed that would be obvious but maybe not. You build your failover strategy into your architecture - there's lots of ways to do it - I use Postgres so I would favor something based around log shipping.
