Instead of an instance, you could just rent a dedicated server with some mirrored TB of drives.

For example, https://www.server4you.com/dedicated-server has 2x 2TB for $25/mo in St. Louis, MO and unmetered bandwidth.

OVH Cloud in the U.S. has servers with 32GB of RAM and also 2x2TB drives starting at $59/mo and unmetered bandwidth. (both of these are French companies that are expanding into the U.S.) If you are interested in other locations (including Canada), check out ovh.com, kimsufi.com, and soyoustart.com (all part of the enormous OVH global footprint).

If you're in EMEA, or don't mind an extra 100 or so millisecond (SSH works fine), check out OVH and Scaleway (France), and of course Hetzner (Germany). Each of these offer dedicated servers for very reasonable prices, and copious amounts of bandwidth with reasonable pings to almost anywhere.

For example, https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml currently has 500GB hard drive servers with Intel Atoms available for $5/mo in both Canada and France, or bigger hard drives for just a few bucks more. This is OVH's cheapest line of servers, but OVH does a pretty extensive burn-in test before deploying them to you, and they tend to be pretty solid. (keep backups in case a hard drive fails, but that's always a good idea anyway.)

I'm a big Hetzner dedicated server fan. I've been using them for 5 years after switching from OVH. Its astounding the amount of hardware and transfer they offer for a extremely reasonable price.

> For example, https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml currently has 500GB hard drive servers with Intel Atoms available for $5/mo in both Canada ...

It says “currently being replenished” for the 2 lowest price packages in Canada

I missed out on that deal too. Guess things get hit quickly when put on HN!

I've found Contabo to be even cheaper and despite what some have said, haven't had any issues with them.

You can host Nextcloud at your home using something like NextcloudPi+DDNS (https://nextcloudpi.com) or HomeDrive (https://homedrive.io, which has ngrok-ish end-to-end tunnels integrated), and the monthly cost would be almost $0. :)

It's cheap if you already own the hardware. Even $300 could be 50 months (4 year) of a remote server at the prices suggested by some of the posts in this page.

Furthermore self hosting a backup server at home doesn't protect against burglars and fires. You'll probably lose both your data and their backup.

That's why I prefer a local backup plus a remote one (a combination of git repositories and file storage. )

The golden rule of backups;

3 backups 2 local 1 remote

I recently set up Nginx on a DO droplet as a reverse proxy to my home server over Wireguard. It's not $0 but it doesn't directly expose my home IP. And I have an authoritative resolver on the LAN so local clients go directly to the private address.

I would also really like to know how you set this up.

I've been thinking about this kind of setup for my and my family's data, at least.

Can you share how you did this? I’ve had this idea for awhile but never figured out how to pull it off.

Hetzner managed nextcloud costs $12/month (https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share?country=us).

Yes. Been using Syncthing and it's been great. Only down side is there's no iOS port.

Yep. It probably works quite well even between desktop, laptop and Android devices, but personally I have a home server running one instance. This allows me to always have the latest copies of files available for any of my devices and that's where the backups live too. Probably a Hetzner box or something should be quite cost effective way to have the same benefits.

I heard about this from another recent HN thread https://www.mobiussync.com however I haven’t had a chance to try it yet so I can’t attest to its quality.

Another Syncthing fan here. The software is great. But I used DO spaces for storage and it's pricy. One of my "to do" lists for 2021 is find a cheaper storage solution and move my backups over.

Wasabi is about the cheapest out there. $5/TB/mo with no bandwidth charges. Backblaze is close in pricing and has a better reputation. I use both.

Thanks I'll check them out :)

Wasabi is S3 compatible storage and costs $6/TB per month.

NextCloud and ownCloud can be set up to utilize Amazon S3 or Wasabi storage. This works really well and is very inexpensive. Both my GFs business files and my personal/work files all are backed up Dropbox style for less then $10 a month including web and mobile access.

I found NextCloud a little buggy compared to OwnCloud but it has more features and unfortunately I'm stuck with it for the time being and can't easily switch back to NextCloud. The sync works fine though.

My little nitpick: Wasabi has that 90 days minimum storage policy.

Exactly. I use Nextcloud with Spaces as a backend. It’s been sitting there for months by now.