[dangus]

Ultimately, after that $5/month plus storage costs, you still have to handle security patching, DR, and everything an infrastructure engineer does all on your own.

Not to knock it, I think it's a great option. It's just not for everyone, not for the dentist next door or anything.

[bityard]

There are oodles of managed nextcloud providers too, their pricing generally matches up favorably with standalone VPS pricing: https://nextcloud.com/providers/

[xfer]

Hetzner provides nextcloud storage for €3. I have used their storage boxes before and they were good.

[bitL]

I think it's a great idea for somebody that already runs their own VPS for their own homepage etc. Once you install NextCloud, you can continue by installing ActivityPub-based decentralized apps, replace most cloud offerings, and be happy about it ;-) I did that; arguably I am not a dentist but if some friend asked me to, I'd have done that for them.