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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.
Legit data centers will probably want personal info so I don't know how anonymous you can be. You might want to start also looking into legal protection, like placing the site and hardware under an LLC. You can pay extra to incorporate in places like NV. Nevada does not reveal owner information to the public. The down side is you need a registered agent in NV, which you can get for a simple monthly fee. Sell the site to the LLC, put the WHOIS as the company. Put donations into a company checking account plus your own startup cash. Pay for the domain renewal, hardware, services, etc with the company account. For tax purposes the profit/loss goes on your normal yearly taxes. Legally the company is the company and not you. If someone sues the site because they found copyrighted material, or defamation or anything like that, the company gets sued, not you. If the company is forced to sell its assets in a settlement, then that is separate from your personal finances. They can't take your car, house, or personal bank account away. This way, at the very worst, you can walk away without losing everything.
Right now you're renting cloud space/compute. The liability there is a little different than if you owned the hosting yourself. It's worth looking into how that works. You don't want to set up a server and get sued 6mo later and lose everything.
The down side is all this takes paperwork, research, and some ongoing fees. You also have to put profit and loss on your taxes. That can benefit you because losses can be written off and used to help you with your tax burden. But there may be limitations to how long you can take losses and how much. This means you may have to look at a similar but different legal entity like a non profit. You also need to handle the crypto exactly right as to not trigger audits or increase legal exposure. IANAL, so idk.
Really, check the contract for renting space in the data center. That will probably contain some indemnification liability info that lets you know how exposed you are.
I'm incorporated in Wyoming as Furry Varmint LLC. No joke. Wyoming is as private as it gets from what I could gather. The WHOIS stuff is done, I just need to do the bank account stuff.
Nice, you're already on it!