> Where is your load balancer? Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?

What we lose sight of, is that those things aren't as important as we, as SREs would like to think. When you're a corporation of one person, trying to stay afloat, you can just rely on a single big box and spend your time dealing with all the other problems first. Make sure you have an escape hatch so you can scale up if need be, but don't overengineer for a problem you won't run in to.

> Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?

Who cares? At this point it's a hobby project that makes zero profit and is bleeding money. No more money is going to be lost if they lose the DB tomorrow. No more money is going to be lost if they go down for an hour or a day or a week (in fact, they might _save_ money if they don't get more AWS charges during the outage).

They have nothing to lose, and about 6k/month to gain by moving to cost-effective hosting, which could actually make this a decent side-project.

Have managed all that in the past with bare metal and more (you forgot configuring routers, installing OS, managing upgrades, dealing with hardware swaps, etc). Its soooo much more sane to deal with that than AWS configuration, actually relatively easy for someone half competent. Luckily we can just employ people to mess around full time with AWS.