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Investing in a server with mass storage would "pay for itself" in less than a year, compared to what I'm currently renting (I'm low key scared to look up the prices of DDR5 RAM and NVMe drives though). Since I plan to maintain TankieTube "forever", it seems like the best option.
I'm so ready to ditch BackBlaze because their timeout errors are causing ~90% of the current problems with the website (external storage move failures and buffering problems). 
I have plenty of experience assembling computers and the thought of building a server is really fun, but I've never used colocation before.
Questions/Thoughts/Concerns:
- Do datacenters let you walk inside to maintain your own server? There is a datacenter in my home city, which would be convenient, but using it would effectively soft-doxx my location. Right now "Burgerland" is as specific as I publicly reveal.
- If I ship the server to a more remote location, how would I replace failed drives? Is that a commonly provided service? Would using a datacenter within ~2 hours driving distance be the best compromise between accessibility and location obfuscation?
- Is paying with Monero an option? Is it a good idea? Could I mail replacement drives directly to the datacenter without revealing my home return address?
It looks like I'll need NVMe drives in something called the U.2 form factor (instead of M.2) in order to enable hot swapping. TIL.
I work in the industry and can talk a tiny bit about my experience with this. I actually don't have a lot of experience working directly with physical equipment. Most of what I do is in the cloud.
As far as going into the data center, set up your server. That is something you can do. Data centers do allow that It's just going to depend on your specific data center.
Typically they do have data center staff that's on site to do that type of thing, but it's normally an extra fee.Otherwise, I think you have to ship staff out there to do it yourself.
I actually don't know about this, but I think there are legal requirements that a data center needs to know who you are in the US. So if you're trying to stay anonymous This is not a great route. Otherwise most data centers work directly with big business and they don't normally accept Monero so you're really gonna have to look around for a data center that'll take cryptocurrency.
Take everything here with a huge grain of salt. I've only been in a data center three times and have only had to give advice on what to do to move out of a data center into the Cloud. This knowledge could be old, it could be archaic, or it could flat be wrong But I wanted to see if I could offer any bit of advice that might be helpful.
I would be shocked if there was a US provider that didn't have KYC
That's more experience than I have, so I appreciate the input, comrade