One thing I would suggest is using local encryption of anything you store in AWS. Plausible deniability is useful for all parties involved.
Of course it's more complex, like how often that data changes and costs of backups vs subscription price. But I find any argument for cloud products etching towards a "you'll own nothing and be happy" economy.
Also, I hope to still be alive when I hand them the keys to my (non AWS) S3 account. I doubt they'd enjoy those games more at 60 than at, like, 15.
Excluding power outages that are out of my control, during which I couldn't do any work anyway, I've had practically zero downtime of my homelab services in the many years I've been running them. Even the dozen hard drives in my NAS with several years of power on time have given me zero issues. I know that I've been lucky, and according to SnapRAID the probability of one failing in the next year is 82%, but so far I haven't had a failure yet. Even when it does happen, I'm fairly confident that the interruption will be minimal and my data will be safe.
All this is to say that running and managing services yourself doesn't require much effort at all, assuming that you're technically inclined and enjoy tinkering. The idea that cloud services are inherently more robust is a myth.
Most service interruptions happen because of two reasons: large scale distributed systems are very difficult to run and maintain, and the constant churn of large engineering teams introduces many operational risks. Essentially, it's all due to complexities of scale. These are not problems that a machine in a closet serving a few users will ever have, especially if you're smart about choosing simple and robust technology.
Far, far better than my residential internet connection, that's for sure.
Of course, I have offsite backup of important stuff in case of fire.
That said, ease of use is likely a lot better with S3 for those who don't like to tinker or have a box sit and hum.
Nobody cares about the 9s. If Amazon wants to they can render the service inoperable legally, over time. Fortunately, S3 is semi-standardized so it’s ”migratable” in a real sense.
The real issue is getting locked out of your account for any arbitrary reason. This happens a lot with big tech and it can be impossible to get help by a human. That’s what scares me the most but more so with Google than Amazon (at the moment).
