These apps are on Digital Ocean, and I don’t remember ever having unplanned downtime with them. They do sometimes migrate instances with advance notice, but that’s a clean shutdown.

I’m sure SQLite is a better choice for almost any app. My reason for not using it was to try avoiding dependencies out of curiosity, and also that I honestly really don’t like writing SQL — it just feels boring and error-prone. (Like eating celery, I know objectively it’s good for me.)