Tbh, the $5 claim was in response to me but I never said any VPS would have the storage capacity to host a catalogue. I said any server. Call it my self-hoster's bias but I really did picture a hardware server with a hard drive in it, not a virtual access tier with artificial limits

But yeah okay, not any server variant can do this and the cloud premium is real. You'd need so spend like 5€/month on real hard drives if you want, say, 4TB of video storage on top of your existing website (the vimeo and dailymotion price points mentioned suggest that their catalogue is above 1 but below 2 TB). The 5€/month estimate is based on the currently most-viewed 4TB hard drive model in the tweakers pricewatch (some 100€), a modest average longevity of 5 years, triple redundancy, and that you would otherwise be running on smaller drives anyway for your normal website and images so there's no (significant) additional labor or electricity costs for storage (as in, you just buy a different variant of the same setup, not need to install additional ones)