Sia's decentralization is unique. It's unique not because it spreads data all over the world, but because there's no central player that controls prices or decides to shut things down. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they can change terms or disable services whenever they want. Sia is a lot more robust, because it's governed via a blockchain, and you put your data on 30+ individual parties, making it extremely unlikely that a sufficient number of them all shutdown simultaneously.

This situation with retiring unlimited storage on ACD would not be possible with Sia. Amazon is changing terms and conditions, Sia is a blockchain where no party has the power to do that.

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To address your pricing comment, there are more than 1000 TB for sale on the Sia network. Adding 2.5 TB to the network would not move the price at all, that's really not how pricing works on Sia.

The reason that it's more expensive than it used to be is because prices are set entirely in Siacoin. When the siacoin prices rise, hosts need to manually re-adjust their prices to keep the same USD price. As of writing, there are no tools that will let this happen automatically. The siacoin price has doubled 6 times in 6 months. The result is that a lot of the defaults are now grossly expensive, and hosts need to be very familiar with the pricing mechanisms to respond accordingly. Most have not, though the ones that have are seeing much higher utilization than the ones that haven't.

We will be releasing stuff in the next month to help hosts set prices more intelligently, that should move the prices back to the competitive spot that they historically been at. The high prices right now are merely a result of market confusion among the hosts.