It is run from a private residence in the DIY punk spririt (and this also allows us to run of a local solar PV system), but more or less the same would happen if you rent rack-space in a "real" data-center. Only if you rent a managed server or VPS someone else will be responsible to fix such issue and this comes at a significantly higher cost at the scale we operate at (slrpnk is part of a bigger project that also hosts other services).

If you rent rack space, you can at least call the DC to send someone to reboot it or smt.

That is, in theory. In practice, it can make a big difference. Source: Worked professionally with large services built in Python and Rust.

Sure, but they will not replace hardware and set up remote access for you, which seems like this would have been required in this case.

For regular users there is not a huge difference, but the web-interface is significantly faster and you can subscribe to topics that combine multiple communities. The disadvantage is less mobile app support. Right now only Interstellar supports Piefed.

The real advantage is for moderators and admins, as the Piefed developers actually listened to community feedback and implemented a lot of nice moderation features that require bots or annoying work-arounds on Lemmy.

And there are a few technical differences that make Piefed easier to administrate and troubleshoot from a sysadmin perspective.

Yes, I also suspect that at a certain scale it would make a difference, but with a single Postgres database and no advanced clustering or so, the real-life performance metrics of a medium sized Lemmy instance strongly point to Postgres being the bottleneck and not the Python or Rust codebase of the rest of the software.

"unforseen hardware failure"

somebody didn't check their backups!