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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 don't know fuck-all about colocation or running PeerTube, but in terms of anonymity it may be worth investigating what you can manage through a reverse-proxy and caching. If you need to colocate a server for the purposes of bulk data storage (and perhaps bulk video encoding), this does not need to be a public-facing system. You can run the public-facing Peertube instance on a relatively lighter server located in LA or New York (or anywhere along the backbone) and have it download media from the colocated server when it misses cache. The Feds would be able to find out where it is, but this doesn't change much from the status quo. This would just prevent casuals and chuds from finding the location of your colo (unless the PeerTube instance got hacked).
I kind of do this with my Mastodon instance. The public-facing VPS has limited storage space (which is quite expensive to expand), so about 1TB of user media lives in S3 storage at another host. The machine serving Mastodon reverse-proxies this media from the S3 host and keeps anything requested in a cache for 48 hours. The end users make no contact with the S3 host. In your case, the caching rules would probably need to be more sophisticated. This solution works great for Mastodon because everyone is generally looking at recent content, and scrolling several days back in the timeline is an exception. For a video website, the data access patterns are likely more random.
In your case, instead of a third-party S3 host, it would be your colocated server, but the principle would be the same. The colocated server can be located near you so you can service it personally, add / replace disks, make hardware improvements as needed, but the public website could be hosted anywhere (though it would help if it weren't sending requests across an ocean every time the cache misses) without physical maintenance being your responsibility. In my case, the Mastodon instance and bulk storage are located in different cities, but the connection between them is good enough for it not to be a problem.
That's a good idea and I'll probably do that to replace BackBlaze at the very least. I already have a 1 TB nginx cache like that on the TankieTube server.
I wouldn't be able to go too light on the front-facing server because it would still need a lot of bandwidth. Having storage and the front server in the same box is attractive because it cuts bandwidth requirements and latency.