Big deal. I charge $5 per TB per month and I'm not even trying to be cheap.
The economies of scale should make this much less expensive. Colocating your own machine in a real datacenter and hosting your own data shouldn't still be cheaper than practically all of "the cloud" offerings, but it is. What does that tell you about "the cloud"? It's marketing bullshit.
Sure, it's fine for occasional use, but anyone using the hell out of "the cloud" can easily save money by using anything else.
That’s not really surprising, but people tend to forget about it. In the end somebody has to pay for ops. It’s business as usual, like it was a century ago.
There are cases where you can indeed save money by doing more by yourself. But how much time does it cost you and how much is your time worth?
How much time do you need to research, purchase, and eventually build your hardware? How much time do you need to get a decent data center deal? How much time do you need to bootstrap your setup? How much time do you need to regularly maintain your infrastructure?
My time is worth a tremendous amount to me, which means I want to use my own hardware. "The cloud" does not guarantee reliability.
Any company that does any project that even slightly regularly requires compute / storage can easily justify the time to do all the things you mentioned.
The fact that many companies have gone towards "the cloud" goes hand-in-hand with the fact that many companies use Windows. It's clearly not the best thing to use to get things done, but the IT people don't want to reduce their importance and the management people like the kickbacks and perks they get from buying certain thing from certain companies.
The savings look good on paper, but the reality is that they're based on leaving out lots of information. I've helped several companies move from "the cloud" back to good, local compute resources because of the amount of money they were hemorrhaging to "cloud" providers.
The economies of scale should make this much less expensive. Colocating your own machine in a real datacenter and hosting your own data shouldn't still be cheaper than practically all of "the cloud" offerings, but it is. What does that tell you about "the cloud"? It's marketing bullshit.
Sure, it's fine for occasional use, but anyone using the hell out of "the cloud" can easily save money by using anything else.