> Everything combined costs me $55 per month.

For many (most?) people this is too much; enough for them to give away some control to a third party - and get a similar product for free.

Hey! Author here! It's been 3 years since I wrote this article. I realized pretty soon I don't need as much resources. I think I'm at 17 bucks per month currently, and I have several more projects running.

I really don't get people selfhosting on a VPS. Defeats the purpose of independence/privacy, limited resources, a few months of bills would cover hardware and electricity.

Hosting some services on a vps provides far better availability of data, than doing it at home. Especially when you need it the most. For example when you are moving to a new home, and need to save documents, or you are abroad, need a document and there is a power outage at home.

Even if you have to trust a 3rd party with your data, (1) you can minimize the privacy risk with encryption and (2) usually VPS/cloud providers have different privacy guaranties than free Google drive...

I have moved a lot of stuff from vps to my home server but I use mine as a glorified reverse proxy for home services with appropriate firewall rules, hosting my website, Adguard dns over https, and Borg backup source. $130cdn/yr.

I'm hosting all of this and more on one old x260 thinkpad with 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory gathering dust in my basement. And an external disk for backup. Total cost? 500 euros or so?

I host most of my stuff myself. the only thing I need to setup is a backup and it's perfect. It's free (minus internet) and it runs my movies, music, streaming, files, previously emails, emulators, and it's smaller than my wifi router. boots and starts automatically and can be remotely managed (though I tend to keep it behind a switch that blocks remote admin)

Blu-ray degrade after time, so it's not the best backup strategy

Depends on timeline

If the concern is: my apartment burned down and I need a backup from this past month, it should be ok (given the double copies & other redundancy)

If the idea is that they feel safe deleting things from main storage because it's backed up several times, your concern is probably right. I'm not sure tape is really justified for their use though. (What else has comparable longevity?)

And of course you could back up somewhere else. But eg mongo doesn't let you delete from their cold storage iirc (I can't validate this claim! So consider it hearsay)

Tape storage is way too expensive. It needs to be disrupted.