>That's not managing the server. That's managing your application setup and not something that takes additional time for managed servers over cloud setups, because you still need all of those things for a cloud setup.

It is additional time because the cloud handles the whole class of "your hardware died" problems.

Most decent bare metal setups abstracts away the same class of "your hardware died" problems. E.g. my first rule on this is everything runs in containers whether I run in a cloud environment or on bare metal. The OS image is identical, and include tying into service discovery and a suitable orchestration mechanism (which can range from something trivially simple to, say, Kubernetes). Any modern server hardware has IPMI or something equivalent, which means you plug it in, configure the IPMI, configure network boot from a tftp/bootp or similar server holding your installation image, and from there on out you're deploying containers the same way as you would in a cloud environment, and back them up and arrange for failover the same way as in a cloud environment.

I've set up more than one hybrid setup where you didn't need to know if your workload was running in AWS or Hetzner or somewhere else, so we could use AWS for elasticity and Hetzner to keep cost down.

This is not a hard problem. And if people don't have the right skills in house, it's easy to outsource this (I for one used to make my living of automating setups like this and operating them on a retainer basis).

Containers running some work load dying is a lot different from a HDD going kaput on your production DB server. Or someone compromising your file system and encrypting all of your user uploads.

I don't think anyone is claiming it's a particularly hard problem. It's the opposite. We're talking about 1 hour a month. Even that little effort still ~$200 a month and a $200 a month managed DB instance is pretty beefy.

None of this is any different I a cloud setup. You still need to check the integrity of your backups. You still need to have appropriate failover. The effort is pretty much the same. In a competent setup it's automated, so you're not spending an hour a month per server. Not even for the production DB server, because you have replicas and setups to automate the switch, and setups to bring back snapshots from backups.

Been there, done that, many times, and I know exactly what it costs people, because I billed by the hour for it, and your cost assumptions are just way off.