The greatest sin in IT industry is to lose your customer’s data. Of course redundancies will cost you. You can always cut corners to keep the costs low and increase your profit margins but when the disaster strikes you will lose all your credebility and chances are you’ll have to spend a lot more to recover from the situation. Don’t cut corners on customer data unless you know how to handle the disasters. Any datacenter can go up in flames, whole AWS regions have gone down, put your infrastructure in version control and be prepared to deploy it in a different cloud. Of course sometimes your customer’s data is worth less and they don’t even expect you to keep them (did you tell them what you’re collecting?), in that case do what crazy thing you wish.

I wrote the lines above while recovering data from a faulty hard drive! No customer data, don’t worry ;-)