Just a noob who likes homelabs and selfhosting
First I’d like to apologize because I originally wrote less than 30TB instead of more than 30TB, I’ve changed that in the post.
A colocation is a data center where you pay a monthly price and they’ll house your server (electricity and internet bandwidth is usually included unless with certain limits and if you need more you can always pay extra).
Here’s an example. It’s usually around $99/99€ per 1U server. If you live in/near a big city there’s probably at least a data center that offers colocation services.
But as I said, it’s only worth it if you need a lot of storage or if you move files around a lot, because bandwidth charges when using object storage tend to be quite high.
For <7 TB it isn’t worth it, but maybe in the future.
Depending on how much storage do you need (>30 TB?), it may be cheaper to use a colocation service for a server as an offsite backup instead of cloud storage. It’s not as safe, but it can be quite cheaper, especially if for some reason you’re forced to rapidly download a lot of your data from the cloud backup. (Backblaze b2 costs $0.01/gb downloaded).
The thing is that right now it’s not worth it to buy a raspberry pi if you want to selfhost. It is 4 years old at this point but it cost 50% more than when it was released.