I think it's interesting to dive into the economics of 95% uptime. Maybe you don't need full datacenter cooling; you can just locate in a cool climate and have a fan in the window blowing cold air in. If there's a blizzard, you lose your drives because snow blows in and melts on your drives. If the chance of the blizzard * price of drives is less than needing 750W of cooling, then you win. Yeah, sometimes everything shorts out.
Power is similar. Maybe you just use solar and turn the drives off when it's cloudy. With enough distribution throughout the world, it will probably be sunny somewhere.
I haven't done the math and I'm not saying it will work out favorably. I also don't have a use case for 95% availability. (That's two weeks a year where your data is gone!) But it's something that someone with the right needs could consider, and maybe come out ahead of someone shooting for 5 nines and drives that aren't covered in snow.
OVH, the massive hosting company, is located in a former aluminum smelter next to a hydroelectric dam in Quebec. They keep costs as low as absolutely possible, but their operating costs as a whole are still considerably higher than something designed with one nine of uptime.
I get that you're mostly joking by saying "yeah sometimes everything shorts out", but we have electrical codes in the US/Canada for a reason.
In most places you don't need to build to code, as long as you take other steps to mitigate risk.
Saying "this entire building is designed to catch fire, and if it does, it won't do harm to neighbouring buildings, people, or the environment" is probably a good start.
Power is similar. Maybe you just use solar and turn the drives off when it's cloudy. With enough distribution throughout the world, it will probably be sunny somewhere.
I haven't done the math and I'm not saying it will work out favorably. I also don't have a use case for 95% availability. (That's two weeks a year where your data is gone!) But it's something that someone with the right needs could consider, and maybe come out ahead of someone shooting for 5 nines and drives that aren't covered in snow.