Comment by immibis
1 month ago
They do rely on you to tell them if hardware fails, however, and they'll still unplug your server and physically fix it. And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.
But the cloud premium needs reiteration: twenty five times. For the price of the cloud server, you can have twenty-five-way redundancy.
> And there's a risk they'll replace the wrong drive in your RAID pair and you'll lose all your data - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.
A medium to large size asteroid can cause mass extinction events - this happens sometimes - it's not a theoretical risk.
The risk of the people responsible for managing the platform messing up and losing some of your data is still a risk in the cloud. This thread has even already had the argument "if the cloud provider goes down, it's not your fault" as a cloud benefit. Either cloud is strong and stable and can't break, or cloud breaks often enough that people will just excuse you for it.
Many people have already had their data destroyed by remote hands replacing the wrong side of a RAID. Nobody's already had their server destroyed by a mass-extincting meteor.
There's a reason semiconductor manufacturing is so highly automated, and it's not labor cost. Humans err. Computers only err when told. But they'll repeat a task reliably without random mistakes if told what to do by a competent (manufacturing process) engineering organization. Yes it takes more than one engineer.