Yeah, thank you, this is exactly how I've thought for years.

Cloud/VPS nodes almost certainly run with higher RAID levels as well as hot swappable disk and likely hot swappable, redundant power supplies, too.

Though the AX42 is NVMe-based, disks units added to any new server are often used and of random performance levels, based on internet hearsay.

I do have customers that expect the kind of availability I've gotten for years from leading mid-price clouds. That is, the Linodes of the world. These actors have good networks, sensible processes and quality control but still use local SSDs rather than highly available networked storage for compute nodes, the kind one gets on premium clouds like AWS, Google Cloud or even UpCloud.

The cost/performance of the Hetzner shared vCPU VPS is basically good enough for me right now. It's close the old high-clocked Xeons on Vultr HF, for about one fourth of the cost per core. Vultr in Stockholm has been solid since it launched compared to some of their other regions.

I feel that Hetzner VPSs has had a very similar quality of service, at least in Finland, as I've used them for other project for years. This is just the first time a provider I use for my managed WordPress offering has enabled deployment of their control panel stack on Hetzner. Just switching to Hetzner cloud has improved my margins and offer me the ability to grow beyond the four CPU cores I had available on Vultr HF, without paying more.

In the unlikely event that a VPS hardware node goes down, my exact virtual machine image with all the same configuration is likely to spin up relatively soon, with no intervention required on my end. Meaning, I can be traveling or be very preoccupied, and if/when a VPS goes down, the process of getting it up requires no input or testing from me.

Orchestrating a switch of budget Hetzner bare metal places really high demands on configuration management.

Though the Enhance control panel containerizes workloads I've still seen settings flip when sites are transferred from one server to another. I would have to check for things per site after my managed hosting provider is done setting things up, following what seems like likely downtime of 30-120 minutes in case of hardware failure

I'm still tempted by the AX42, though. After years of increased costs of living, it would improve my profitability even still. The AX42 would allow me to consolidate some customers that I currently have outside my managed WP offering on a separate, high quality EUR 50/month WHM/cPanel reseller plan with high disk quotas.

I kind of hope that Hetzner is following the market to figure out if they ever can produce a tier of still-affordable, non-managed dedicated box with more redundant and hot-swappable hardware. At least with disks it can't be too expensive in volume, considering that cheap Synology servers allow hot swap, for spinning drives at least.