That‘s a good decision! Developers nowadays fear a failing machine so much because it‘s happening more often on the cloud than dedicated servers. I wouldn‘t use automatic failover too. Cleaning up the mess can take hours and days, a small downtime of a few minutes/hours is better.

I‘ve seen one developer using telegram for ha-failover which is great! Just a message and the scripts are executed for a failover. You can do it in seconds without even being on a computer.