[cm2187]

It depends what you do with it. If you only need a small VM to manage your emails nothing will beat a VPS. But I also use it for offsite backup, so need a bit of storage. When you add dozens of TB, dedicated quickly becomes way more expensive. Particularly given that I tend to park there old hard drives which cost I have already amortised.

[Dylan16807]

Well, up to a few dozens of TB hetzner will charge you €27 per month for each 22TB hard drive, so it's not that fast that colocation gets better.

[cm2187]

If you buy your drives smartly that's amortised after 8 months. When you are looking at the cost over 5 years, it is hard to beat colocation for specialised hardware.

[Dylan16807]

I'm ignoring upfront cost here, and going based on the premise of 100€-300€ as the monthly fee for colocation. You can't amortize your way out of that.