sponev I have a website/forum for a club which we run two servers - one live and one rsync’d (it has a database for the forum)
It requires manual intervention to swap the ip address on the domain name - but as we use aws that takes about 2minutes.
In about 6 years we haven’t had to use the fallback server. But for the extra cost a month it’s a no brainier (about £3)
Now I accept that the givenergy servers are probably more powerful etc. but they should be on a pier1 server which has a high uptime. We had that for one of our critical data servers at work. But did cost a significant amount.
But how critical is the server? From a data storage and reporting not that critical. Yes some granularity is lost but not the end of the world. However as it is used for control of many peoples systems, particularly around the time of the failure, then it is pretty critical.
How critical it is for an individual is for the individual to decide. For me it’s inconvenient. And it’s why I have local monitoring and control. But others don’t have either the skill set or inclination to do the work needed to make it work locally.