&gt; I don&#x27;t care who does the calculation and how many nines they come up with - if you load FreeBSD on two bare metal servers and put them in two different datacenters and run them with any kind of conservative and cautious sysadminning you&#x27;ll have a better solution. Yes, it will be more expensive.[1][2]<p>Nonsense. It&#x27;s very easy to have that kind of setup fail - remove one from the load balancer, take it down for maintenance, whoops we removed the wrong one from the load balancer. I&#x27;ve been in similar-sized companies using dedicated servers or AWS, so I&#x27;ve seen both sides. It&#x27;s like how people feel safer when driving themselves than when being driven by a professional, even though a professional is overwhelmingly likely to be a better driver - everyone thinks &quot;oh, there&#x27;s no way <i>I&#x27;d</i> make that kind of mistake&quot;.<p>It is very easy to overengineer &quot;high availability&quot; systems - I certainly think things like STONITH and dedicated control planes are more trouble than they&#x27;re worth, and running a system that you don&#x27;t understand is a recipe for failure. But I&#x27;ll take FreeBSD on a basic AWS setup - four EC2 nodes (multiple AZs), and an ELB - over bare metal any day. Physical server maintenance is not where I have a competitive advantage, and would mean more complexity to understand, not less.