Comment by wolrah

> I rent physical servers from them that have been previously rented to other customers. At some point hard drives fail.

The comparison in this case is to Hetzner's VPS offerings, which are probably less powerful than the average "old laptop" but have a significant advantage in terms of hardware reliability. It's still possible for the host running the VPS to have problems which result in a crash or the VM equivalent of a hard power off but the VM hosts and their underlying storage should be redundant such that the virtual hardware never fails.

That's not to say rebooting from a crash-consistent state will always work, you should always keep backups even with a high-quality VPS host, but the odds of recovering cleanly from a hardware problem are orders of magnitude better than an old laptop. For the sort of hobby project or personal tinker box that would be reasonable to host on a random laptop shoved in a rack you probably wouldn't even notice the downtime until you saw the event notification email your provider sends you.