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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.
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.