[Zvez]

>Let's keep in mind that modern hardware and software is very stable, generally

Not at any significant scale. dimm will fail, power will be down, disks will need replacement.

It is all about risks after all. If you are ok to have couple of hours of downtime if one of the memory sticks stops working - good for you. But generally any large enough business won't tolerate such risks.

I'm not saying that the cloud is the answer, but I don't see any future for single instance solution. And if you design your system like this, you are taking much more risks than necessary.