Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hetzner normally advertises their hardware servers as 2x 1 TB SSD, because it's strongly recommended to run them in SWraid1 for net 1TB. (Their image installer will default to that) Once the first SSD fails after some years, and your monitoring catches that, you can either migrate to a new box, find another intermediate solution/replica, or let them hotswap it while the other drive takes on. Of course though, going t…
For over a decade I ran a small scale dedicated and virtual hosting business (hundreds of machines) and the sort of setup you describe works very well. Software RAID across 2 devices, redundant power supplies, backups. We never had a significant data loss event that I recall (significant = beyond user accidentally removing files). For quite a while we ran single power supplies because they were pretty high quality, b…
It does still mean something.
If you have a 5% annual chance of failure and no redundancy, your five year failure chance is 23%.
If you have redundancy and literally never check for five years, your five year failure chance is 5%. That's already a huge improvement. If you do an inventory of broken parts twice a year, still no proper monitoring, it goes down to 0.6%
For 2% the numbers are: 10% 1% 0.1%
For 10% the numbers are: 41% 17% 2.6%
(The approximations for small percents are x*5, x²*25, and x²*2.5)