This is basically the premise of https://www.blacksmith.sh/ as far as I know, though without the need to host the hardware yourself and the potential complexity they comes with that.
I did have some MySQL servers racked for over a decade and I was afraid to restart the machines. And yes as new versions of MySQL came out I did have to compile them myself.
Similar lower specced machines that were closer to the public internet had boot disk failures, but I had a few of them, so it wasn’t an issue. Spinning metal and all.
One of the db servers dying would have required a next day colo visit… so I never rebooted.
I did have some MySQL servers racked for over a decade and I was afraid to restart the machines. And yes as new versions of MySQL came out I did have to compile them myself.
Similar lower specced machines that were closer to the public internet had boot disk failures, but I had a few of them, so it wasn’t an issue. Spinning metal and all.
One of the db servers dying would have required a next day colo visit… so I never rebooted.