For business related services I use root servers hosted by e.g. Hetzner. I don't want to deal with hardware maintenance nor the 24/7 power bill.
For private stuff (pictures, videos, movies) I have a cheap old desktop machine at home with lots of storage running Ubuntu. Easy to administer, and I can switch it off if not needed. Data is mirrored and snapshotted.
For long-term backup I encrypt my data and upload it to Amazon Glacier Deep Archive (around 1$/TB!)
That said the cloud in general is great and you can do some things today for cheap that weren't possible for most companies 10 years ago. For some use cases it's the best choice.
In general a lot of workloads can be served orders of magnitudes cheaper than 10 years ago.
For business related services I use root servers hosted by e.g. Hetzner. I don't want to deal with hardware maintenance nor the 24/7 power bill.
For private stuff (pictures, videos, movies) I have a cheap old desktop machine at home with lots of storage running Ubuntu. Easy to administer, and I can switch it off if not needed. Data is mirrored and snapshotted.
For long-term backup I encrypt my data and upload it to Amazon Glacier Deep Archive (around 1$/TB!)
That said the cloud in general is great and you can do some things today for cheap that weren't possible for most companies 10 years ago. For some use cases it's the best choice.
In general a lot of workloads can be served orders of magnitudes cheaper than 10 years ago.