What is wrong in this case w/ multiple VPS's? For instance, I run a shipping system that our entire operation depends on. I can't afford downtime either, as that would shutdown our entire shipping department. However, 1 server running on-prem, 1 remote in shared hosting and 2 failover servers on DigitalOcean costs ~$120/month.
What would a managed cloud like AWS or Azure provide besides higher expenses? Last I checked, AWS would be ~$550/month based on their calculator.
IT departments managed redundancy long before cloud was a thing, and it's certainly possible to achieve acceptable uptime without the managed services. I realize that I still rely on DO for their uptime, and I'm pricing renting rackspace for that reason. However, uptime is currently within acceptable levels (ie I haven't had to explain to the CEO why all his employees are standing around). We had tried 2 SaaS vendors before our current on-prem solution, and both had had downtime that cost us money. Both were hosted in AWS, so clearly that isn't the panacea for ultimate reliability. If our on-prem server goes down, I get a call. However, I got calls when our SaaS vendor went down as well; sitting on line with their tech support wasn't any great comfort.
The same graceful failover processes are accessible on machines you control, there's no reason that you have to run on one machine if you avoid the cloud. The biggest hurdle for me to implement this was database concurrency with multiple servers, but a cloud solution wouldn't have done anything to solve that problem.
[edit:] typos and miss-typed AWS pricing due to mobile keyboard.
What would a managed cloud like AWS or Azure provide besides higher expenses? Last I checked, AWS would be ~$550/month based on their calculator.
IT departments managed redundancy long before cloud was a thing, and it's certainly possible to achieve acceptable uptime without the managed services. I realize that I still rely on DO for their uptime, and I'm pricing renting rackspace for that reason. However, uptime is currently within acceptable levels (ie I haven't had to explain to the CEO why all his employees are standing around). We had tried 2 SaaS vendors before our current on-prem solution, and both had had downtime that cost us money. Both were hosted in AWS, so clearly that isn't the panacea for ultimate reliability. If our on-prem server goes down, I get a call. However, I got calls when our SaaS vendor went down as well; sitting on line with their tech support wasn't any great comfort.
The same graceful failover processes are accessible on machines you control, there's no reason that you have to run on one machine if you avoid the cloud. The biggest hurdle for me to implement this was database concurrency with multiple servers, but a cloud solution wouldn't have done anything to solve that problem.
[edit:] typos and miss-typed AWS pricing due to mobile keyboard.