> What you can do about it is go back to the early 2000s and rack up your own boxes in a colo, with some reasonable unmetered bandwidth allocations, and skip the whole "cloud" nonsense.

Yep, we used to pay about $35/mo for an unmetered 1Gbit 1U slot at our local datacenter. What surprised me (but maybe is a standard these days?) is that you don't even need to install the server physically yourself. You just buy it, ship it to the datacenter, and wait for the remote access.