The biggest mistake I made was high uptime. arjie.com was up for 10 years plus on a Hetzner VPS so that by the time they wanted to sunset the machine underlying I had no idea what my teenage self had set up. I have the backups but the site hasn’t been up in a decade…

Nowadays I build things so that they move and I have moved things about a bit so I know they work.

"The biggest mistake I made was high uptime"

Quite. I'm old enough to remember machine uptime being a badge of honour.

However, being older and not really wiser, I look for service uptime these days. Yes we did have similar back in the day, that's why MX and the like DNS records exist.

Old school clusters were pretty esoteric but the lessons were learned (split brain n that) and that's why we still argue the toss with kiddies about why a Proxmox cluster with two nodes is fucked and why we recommend an additional "witness".

I don't care that VMware glossed over the whole two node HA cluster thing years ago with a massive bodge. They were wrong then and they are probably still wrong because that nonsense is probably still baked in.

Sorry, slight digression.

High uptime implies no patching. We all love patching.

Indeed, for a VM, high uptime makes little sense, because a reboot takes a few seconds, and an upgrade requires no downtime, just switching the DNS to a new instance.

For a physical machine which you can't easily copy, it's a different story.

I started putting things in a big ansible playbook repo. Don't need to have it fully managed by ansible either I mostly just have setup configured there I still do lots of by hand management.