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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.
Yes. Some are more strict than others. One of our datacenters I have a badge, a pin, and I can get in without alerting anyone. Others I have to schedule it, get greeted at the door, and have them check your ID. And some were really strict about giving them at least one hour heads up. Others you can say I'm OMW and they're cool. It really depends on their polices.
How would someone know it's in your city unless you explicitly say?
Pay like $50 an hour for an employee to replace it for you, and possibly connect a remote crash cart.
They're almost 100% not going to let you be anonymous to them. If you're doing illegal stuff and getting DMCAs out the wazoo they're gonna shut your ass down almost immediately. They shouldn't doxx you (unless you get sued), but you cannot be anonymous to them.
Also FYI colo prices have gone up a lot because of the demand from AI datacenters. Either they want to be one, or people are getting priced out and moving to the cheaper ones. Also U.2 drives are still pretty expensive. I'd stick with spinning rust if you want mass storage. Unless you're planning on having a TON of users that the drives can't keep up. Some colos will let you plunk a tower down on a shelf. So one ATX tower with 8 3.5" drives aint bad.
The security makes sense. If they let you walk in, I was wondering how they would prevent someone from plugging some kind of sniffer on a competitor's server.
DMCA-ignored "bulletproof" hosting providers exist outside the US, but a problem is that their IP reputations suck which makes it impossible to send emails from them.
Is there anything AI hasn't ruined?
I'm 100% using HDDs for video storage—probably a ZFS RAID 10 array of 36 TB drives. The U.2 SSDs would be only for the operating system, database, and possibly a small video cache and a ZFS SLOG if the hard drives have to do synchronous writes (probably not the case if they are on the same machine as the main server).
In my experience, a combination of security watching you, and all the cabinets but your own should be locked.
That being said, they tend to be pretty flimsy, pickable locks..
*Mr. Robot music plays*
Put email on a different server?
I thought the DNS records required the mail server to be on the same IP, but it looks like I was wrong. I still don't know if I can configure the PeerTube application like that though.
MX record doesn't conflict with anything and you can put the other stuff (DNS records for sending, including the anti spam signatures) on a subdomain while still being able to send emails with the main domain.
The service probably just needs SMTP settings I'd guess. Those can be on any server. You could also use some hosted mail for that, but I think most of privacy conserving providers put some pretty low limits on how much emails you can send because they don't want to ruin the standing of their IP addresses. Idk maybe there are more options when you can pay through the LLC.
FWIW, I also do this with matapacos.dog. The mail server is running on its own tiny VPS with it's own IP, a completely separate system (though hosted at the same company / datacenter). Its actual domain is mail.matapacos.dog, but the mail is sent with a @matapacos.dog address. This works in a similar way (but through a different mechanism - DNS records vs. Webfinger) to how the Mastodon instance is hosted at toots.matapacos.dog, but user handles are @matapacos.dog.
The reputation of public VPS hosts within reach of the US copyright regime isn't much better lmao. I have to imagine there is just a constant stream of abandoned Wordpress blogs and unmaintained websites for pizzarias and bicycle shops getting hacked and assimilated into botnets.