Personally I am using my services for business email and storage with my vps and dedicated server have local.
I have searched also for the cheapest solution for storage. I experimented with nextcloud and it is trustoworthy although if you compare the price of the vps serving the docker container with S3, with dropbox and then with Google Drive you end up that with Google Drive it is cheaper per GB. But then, if you do not want actually the full 2TB you can use slices of 250GB S3 which is cheaper. The upside with VPS though, is that you can host databases and other apps too which you cannot do this in none of the other contestents. My local servers are two raspberry PIs with external storage a usb of 64 GB. In one of them I run Home Assistant and the other plays the role of a linux server with some docker containers I use.
Someone can say that Chinese solutions are better than US...
Oh, they are better... I believe it too. Just compare DeepSeek with ChatGPT. If you take a snapshot of the mean international tests success of students worldwide in several countries, east and southeast Asia tops in all charts. This means that they are doing something right or better than the thing we are doing. What bugs me, is the legal frame in China which is penertratable in every aspect. We as Greeks say: "This thing broke. Was it chinese?". Why do we say that? Because the Chinese legal frame is penertratable and does not set a clear legal frame that will set as trustwrothy the X chinese product. Something like the CE in Europe. Although this example is not completely connected with the intellectual property sector it sets a clear view of how the chinese legal frame is penertratable.