This looks like an excellent platform for running a "homelab" in the cloud (no, the irony is not lost on me) for lighter stuff like Readeck, Calibre-web, Immich. Maybe even Home Assistant too if we can find a way (Tailscale?) to get the mDNS/multicast traffic tunnelled.

With pricing 100gb/8usd Immich would be wildly uneconomical. Better to wait for upcoming immich hosting to support the project or use ente.io - those are 1tb/10usd.

That's a good tip, thanks. What I meant to say was that there's probably at least a handful of self-hosted services you could run to offset that $20/mo.

Another one could be Bitwarden, although I don't host my own password manager personally. Or netbird. You get the point

... in exactly one of this planet's countries

Not trying to account for the parent's claim, but generally check diskprices.com for the latest deals on Amazon (.com, .co.uk, .de, .es, .it etc)

Newegg regularly offers sales on hard drives, which is when I buy.

I worked in the Arctic for the better part of a decade. There's Starlink now, but I've been TRULY OFFLINE for weeks (with plenty diesel generated power) as recently as 2018. Technically we could use Iridium at like $10 per MB, but my full Wikipedia mirror (+ Debian/Ubuntu packages, PyPI etc) did come in handy more than once.

I know some Antarctic research stations (like McMurdo for example) still have connectivity restrictions depending on time-of-day, and I wouldn't be surprised if they also had mirrors of these sort of things, and/or dual-3090 rigs for llama.cpp in the off hours.