I would have to agree. But I would also have to agree that Heroku or AWS may have been a better choice than a 1&1 dedicated server in this particular instance.

However, Heroku and AWS are no substitute for good systems administration. They are good substitutes for data centers given signed and documented SLAs.

It's a recurring theme on HN. I'm a sysadmin and cringe when reading these rather common posts.

Developers are like any other person. "How hard can it be?"