42 is an extremely non-special number. Does anyone know if it appeared in the CS field before Douglas Addams "invented" it?

What do you mean, non-special? 42 is the magic constant of the smallest non-trivial magic cube.

It’s also an integer. Who ch I pretty special when you consider that most numbers in nature are real.

I have yet to see a number in nature.

Nature is full of them.

But they're real, right? Or is too complex to just say so?

There isn’t a fraction of me which didn’t appreciate that comment

*was

No provider is better than two providers.

Hosting on second- or even third-tier providers allows you to overprovision and have much better redundancy, provided your solution is architected from the ground up in a vendor agnostic way. Hetzner is dirt cheap, and there are countless cheap and reliable providers spread around the globe (Europe in my case) to host a fleet of stateless containers that never fail simultaneously.

Stateful services are much more difficult, but replication and failover is not rocket science. 30 minutes of downtime or 30 seconds of data loss rarely kill businesses. On the contrary, unrealistic RTOs and RPOs are, in my experience, more dangerous, either as increased complexity or as vendor lock-in.

Customers don't expect 100% availability and noone offers such SLAs. But for most businesses, 99.95% is perfecty acceplable, and it is not difficult to have less than 4h/year of downtime.