I keep trying to weigh the costs of doing things in the cloud versus having a home lab. Right now I have a mix of both and find the the home lab tends to be cheaper if spread over a few year period. Things like disk space are fairly expensive in the cloud, while things like shared cpu usage are cheap. It is annoying to find that happy spot. For example, if I want 100TB of disk space in the cloud, the cheapest I can find is wasabi (S3 compatible) which comes out to be about $600/month (not including download!) Now, doing a rotation disk (slow, but fast enough - probably faster than my download speed) with 8 disks (5 + 3 parity, each 20TB) is almost $2000. At $600/month (again with no downloads!) it would take just shy of 3.5 months to equal the same amount of money spent. This is of course simplying things: I didn't include the cost of the server that the disks are attached to, power consumption, etc. Too bad I'm a Broke Joke (TM)!