Four tiers
Four tiers organise this space, and the industry now talks in these terms whichever cloud you run on. Each tier keeps more of your system alive in the recovery region, so each recovers faster and costs more.
Start at the floor: backup and restore. Data copied to another region, and nothing else exists until disaster. Then you build the whole stack from scratch, from your infrastructure code if you are disciplined and from memory if you are not.
Expect hours to days to recover, data loss wherever your backup schedule puts it, and a standing cost of storage alone, meaning nearly nothing.
Move up to a pilot light, which keeps the hardest part alive. Your data replicates continuously into live databases in the second region, with the application infrastructure defined but scaled to nothing.
Scale up compute around that warm data on the day, and your recovery drops to tens of minutes, because loading the data, the slow step, is already done.
Run a warm standby if you can afford it: the full stack in the second region at maybe a tenth of capacity. Failover is a DNS change your provider's health checks can automate, plus scaling up, so you recover in minutes.
Notice the subtler thing you bought. That environment serves real health checks daily, so it rots far more slowly than a cold one ever could.
Active everywhere, and what it really costs
Go active in several regions at full capacity if the business genuinely needs it, splitting traffic across them. Losing a region then simply reweights routing, and your recovery numbers approach zero.
Count the honest cost there, and it is not the doubled infrastructure bill. It is the engineering: data across regions means replication lag, conflict handling, and a consistency decision on every write path. A handful of companies operate here. Most should not.
Pick per system, not per company. Payments on warm standby, the marketing site on backup and restore, and everything in between priced against the recovery time your business actually signed.
Worked example
Diego runs infrastructure for an e-commerce company doing about 80,000 dollars an hour at peak, and the board asks what happens if their primary cloud region goes down. Multi-region active-active prices out around 45,000 a month plus a re-architecture of the checkout data layer, which nobody wants to fund. He proposes pilot light instead: Aurora cross-region replicas for the two core databases, container images and infrastructure templates already present in the DR region, compute at zero. Standing cost lands near 6,000 a month. The first evacuation drill takes 51 minutes, mostly waiting on autoscaling and one hardcoded region string someone finds at minute 30. The second drill, after fixes, takes 22. The board gets a one-line answer: a region failure costs about 25 minutes of sales, and holding that risk costs 6,000 a month.