@chopsstephens @rastilin @aurynn @xssfox
Oh, I don't have anything to criticise Audrynn for. Her setup looks pretty nice actually.

But I also don't necessarily see a single machine setup to be inherently worse. Aurynn's setup currently works on 8 machines, each with its own distinct role. That's 8 points of failure. If one of them dies of if connection breaks between them, all of them can stop working (especially if that hits the database one). It's nice if someone's dealing with redundancy for you, but you have to trust them to do it right.

As for my setup, I can just throw those disks to another machine (I still have a few laying around) and it'll most likely keep working without changing anything.

But I have to agree, sometimes it's just better to pay someone else to deal with all of that for you. (Unless when it's too expensive to justify the cost.) But since Aurynn instance is a paid one I guess she can figure something out. She does look like a smart one.