This is sort of true of owning a car or a home or basically anything. Of those things, my server requires by far the least amount of maintenance (even considering needing to take a day to do something more invasive maintenance once two years or so).
I also think it's perfectly fine if my site is down for a day or so because I'm away on travel and it's gone offline. 89.9999% has five nines as well.
> I also think it's perfectly fine if my site is down for a day or so because I'm away on travel and it's gone offline. 89.9999% has five nines as well.
I think this is the key takeaway: host at home unless you want good uptime.
I don't host from home when I want the page to be available even if:
1. There's a power outage at my home
2. I need to e.g. change a lightbulb, so I have to turn off the power (and therefore my router and server)
3. Someone accidentally switches off either the router or server
You turn off the power to change a lightbulb? It never occurred to me before that that could be a dangerous activity. You hold it by the glass and unscrew it, then do the reverse for the new one. Your hand should never goes near the socket, right?
It doesn't even really take much to get 99.999% uptime from a home server. I have my server, cable modem, router, and firewall plugged into a small UPS that can keep everything going for about 30 minutes if the power goes. I've never had downtime due to power interruptions.
If I lived in an area where the power was less reliable, I'd use a bigger UPS.
In order for someone to accidentally switch off a critical piece of equipment, they'd have to go to my closet and remove all of the boxes and other crap I have stacked in front of it in there. Not likely to happen by accident.
A UPS solves a lot of these problems. You may lose availability during a power outage, but you don't lose uptimes, and those hard shut-offs are nasty for harddrive longevity.
I also think it's perfectly fine if my site is down for a day or so because I'm away on travel and it's gone offline. 89.9999% has five nines as well.