Here's what i do for my homelab setup that has a few machines running locally and some VPSes "in the cloud":

I personally have almost all of the software running in containers with an orchestrator on top (Docker Swarm in my case, others may also use Nomad, Kubernetes or something else). That way, rescheduling services on different nodes becomes less of a hassle in case of any one of them failing, since i know what should be running and what configuration i expect it to have, as well as what data needs to be persisted.

At the moment i'm using Time4VPS ( affiliate link: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 ) for the stuff that needs decent availability and because they're cheaper than almost all of the alternatives i've looked at (DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway, AWS, Azure) and that matters to me.

Now, in case the entire data centre disappears, all of my data would still be available on a few HDDs under my desk (which are then replicated to other HDDs with rsync locally), given that i use BackupPC for incremental scheduled backups with rsync: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/

For simplicity, the containers also use bind mounts, so all of the data is readable directly from the file system, for example, under /docker (not really following some of the *nix file system layout practices, but this works for me because it's really easy to tell where the data that i want is).

I actually had to migrate over to a new node a while back, took around 30 minutes in total (updating DNS records included). Ansible can also really help with configuring new nodes. I'm not saying that my setup would work for most people or even anything past startups, but it seems sufficient for my homelab/VPS needs.

My conclusions:

  - containers are pretty useful for reproducing software across servers
  - knowing exactly which data you want to preserve (such as /var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata) is also pretty useful, even though a lot of software doesn't really play nicely with the idea
  - backups and incremental backups are pretty doable even without relying on a particular platform's offerings, BackupPC is more than competent and buying HDDs is far more cost effective than renting that space
  - automatic failover (both DNS and moving the data to a new node) seems complicated, as does using distributed file systems; those are probably useful but far beyond what i actually want to spend time on in my homelab
  - you should still check your backups