Back in 2009-2013 or so I ran a quite popular add-on for World of Warcraft which aggregated data from about 200k active users regularly uploading it, maybe 5GB per day, into a common database of 5-10MB that was then downloaded by about 1 million users in varying intervals back into the game (it was some sort of mapping database, telling you where in the world which NPC was, with that info gathered by users using the tool). It came to eat several terabytes of monthly traffic, which was huge back in those days, but I operated that infrastructure by myself for several years on a single dedicated server for about 50€ responsible for the data aggregation work (heavy on I/O and computation) and two virtual server instances for about 15€ each which basically only served the downloads. The included traffic package on those VPSes was large, actually I chose the VPS offering precisely for that reason because I could economically cover all the download traffic that way. The compute power on them sucked, but they were basically a simple CDN setup so that didn't matter much. The total was about 70€, off course domain etc. need to be added, but I never paid more than 100€ for hosting of that app.

It is really disconcerting to see that doing similar "do-it-yourself" hosting activities nowadays appear to cost twice as much (judging by the article) while the "raw msterials" - core backbone traffic, compute power, memory and storage - all have gotten waaaaay cheaper in the last decade. Too many new rent-seeking middlemen, I guess...