Comment by toast0

Sometimes yes, but if there's a hardware issue, I may not be able to.

Ex: the first server I had failed and they ended up replacing it with a different server with similar specs, but the drives werem't moved. In this case, the failure was gradual (resetting by itself) and as part of debugging it, I wiped the drives and installed a new OS, but towards the end, the amount of time between resets was very short, and I wouldn't have had a chance to wipe it if I had started later.

Yes, this isn't great service, but it's personal hosting and it's cheap and I get a whole (very old) machine.