He's saying his goal is controlling his data, not necessarily 100% uptime, so even if the site ends up going down, he still retained control of his data, and therefore did not fail on the metric that is actually important to him.

Maybe if you specialize in hosting large traffic sites, but if the content got enough attention to cause server failure, then it had to be at least moderately successful content.

Only if your goal is to support that amount of traffic.