I could probably design and deploy an HA system for way less. Maybe less than $200/month. It wouldn't be the most performant, but would be HA in three regions.
But it leads me back to my original statement - extreme requirements for uptime don't come out of nothing.
If you're in a location where IT related labor is extremely cheap - you're just going to have people keep one server up.
I know I used to do exactly that, because the server was more than my annual income. But that didn't last long. After the first 20 minute downtime, the budget for HA solution was allocated. But before a certain point downtime wasn't expensive.
Non-profits would probably be the only reasonable exception, where HA and low budgets could coincide. Otherwise - nah...
Those are all fair points, perhaps even more so given the trend of compute and other resources generally becoming more cheap with time (things like Wirth's law and limited IPv6 support aside), thanks for expanding on your arguments!
But it leads me back to my original statement - extreme requirements for uptime don't come out of nothing.
If you're in a location where IT related labor is extremely cheap - you're just going to have people keep one server up.
I know I used to do exactly that, because the server was more than my annual income. But that didn't last long. After the first 20 minute downtime, the budget for HA solution was allocated. But before a certain point downtime wasn't expensive.
Non-profits would probably be the only reasonable exception, where HA and low budgets could coincide. Otherwise - nah...