Oh yea it's always easier with scale. The main point I was trying to make is that the hardware is actually pretty cheap compared to the network costs to link it. Especially when large companies dump 2 year old servers for pennies on the dollar because the electricity costs at their scale justify it.

Side note: I took that cluster and split it into 8. Then moved them to different geographical locations and where I could use friend or families residential connections and a cloudflare cluster to offset my cost in exchange for unlimited hosting. Very similar to Ceph actually