We have been using M5 Hosting for one of our servers since 2011. They have been extremely reliable up until today. Based on what was posted about the Hacker News server setup, we have something similar. We have a "warm spare" server in a different data center. We use Debian, not FreeBSD.

We are in the process of slowly moving to a distributed system (distributed DB) that is going to make fallover easier. However, that kind of setup is orders of magnitudes more complex than the current (manual fallover) setup. I really wonder if the planned design is going to be more reliable in practice. Complexity is almost always a bad idea, in my experience. Distributed systems are just fundamentally very complicated.

Oh hi! Thank you for the kind words. I cant tell who you are by your name here, but if you've been with us since 2011, we have certainly spoken. Are you using our second San Diego data center for your failover location? If you and I aren't already talking directly, ask to speak with Mike in your ticket.

I had used M5 some years ago to host an online rent payment / property management app. Have nothing but positive things to say about that experience. We once had an outage that was our own fault on our single server and they had someone go in, in the middle of the night, to reboot it for us and we weren't even on an SLA.

Thank you for sharing your positive experience! We can power cycle power outlets remotely and can connect a console (ip kvm)... and we are staffed 24x7.... in case you need another server. Thanks again!