I've not actually seen an AZ go down in isolation, so whilst I agree its technically a less "robust" deployment, in practice its not that much of a difference.
> these "we cut bare costs by moving away from the cloud" posts are catnip for HN. But they usually don't make sense.
We moved away from atlas because they couldn’t cope with the data growth that we had(4tb is the max per DB). Turns out that its a fuck load cheaper even hosting on amazon (as in 50%). We haven't moved to hertzner because that would be more effort than we really want to expend, but its totally doable, with not that much extra work.
> more maintenance tasks (installing, upgrading, patching, troubleshooting, getting on-call, etc) with lower reliability and fewer services, isn't an advantage.
Depends right, firstly its not that much of an overhead, and if it saves you significant cash, then it increases your run rate.