Backups are only advanced in the context of our Postgres being "Good" enough (maybe our built-in Posgres could be called "Barely enough" but that sounds a bit lame) :-)

I fully agree with you though, it's table stakes (unintended pun!) for any prod deployment, just as read-only followers, etc. Our biggest, most important point, is that folks should be using real dbs hosted by people who know what they're doing. The risk/reward ratio is out of whack in terms of doing it yourself.

And finally, re Hetzner and latency, that's unfortunately a very good issue that we have encountered. The solution in one case was to use an EC2 machine in the same region as the Crunchy Bridge deployment (ie some db providers end up being explicit about which AWS region they run in - and obviously, using RDS is also an option!) It's definitely a consideration.