Regarding num channels manageable: Depends on the hardware/bandwidth your node has. Also, any custom scripts/tooling to manage channels automatically "in bulk" without becoming overwhelming to manually maintain.
Quality is always better than quantity, IMO.
Regarding uptime:
These days I run every node in as a VM in Proxmox. Since the machine is virtualized, I can do live migrations. It means I can transfer the Node VM to another server over the internet while its running. Even the memory is migrated without any downtime.
Thanks for the guide. Saved the migration one for later
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