It could be your private cloud therefore your computer. <5% of people probably have their own server. When that % changes significantly, we may need to stop saying this.
Most people in tech still use @gmail addresses, do you think regular people bother to have their own private cloud for data storage ?
Granted, they could be using Proton or some other alternative. But you still have the same inherent problem that someone else hosts/owns your email data.
Of course that doesn't help when you've had a Gmail address for 15 years and can't get rid of it
I didn't want to bother dealing with the advanced calculator but the AWS EC2 instance to handle this bespoke application would be $130k/yr with one year upfront and 12 month reservation:
https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=b3de412ba6a7748e9acd782...
This doesn't include bandwidth (which AWS has an insane markup on) or nearly enough storage.
Needless to say you can lease the hardware from $VENDOR and host it for years with an all you can eat 10gig port. Oh and the cost is absolutely fixed - no worries about getting that shocking AWS bill we all know of.
With a lease and hosting it's still an operating expense and with Section 179 it's actually preferable from a tax standpoint.
With datacenter remote hands and vendor support you're still not dealing with hardware - you don't have to even step foot in the hosting facility. Ever. If a hardware component fails the vendor dispatches someone and it gets handled (same day). That said hardware failures are (in my experience) exceedingly rare until you get to some significant scale where it's a numbers game.
Because ec2 is OS up anyway from a dev ops standpoint it's pretty much identical.
Let's say you keep it for three years and upgrade. The old hardware is still worth something so you can repurpose, sell, trade, whatever.
Rough math but let's call this approach 1/4 the cost (but likely much less).
At AWS markup you can hire a dedicated full time person to manage just one server and still come out ahead. Want five of them around the world? Now you're saving a TON of money vs different AWS regions.
Even with this when I tell people we deployed our own hardware they look at me like I'm crazy. We have an entire generation in tech from jr devs to the C suite to investors that are terrified of hardware and will pay anything to avoid it.
Because of this they don't even know what hardware, bandwidth, etc actually costs. It's assumed the cost is whatever $BIGCLOUD offers it at. I know this is an extreme case but it probably happens more than most would think.
The risk surface for self-hosting is higher, on multiple axes, than cloud-hosting. Hosting your own cloud is the "I don't trust auto mechanics so I'm going to become an auto mechanic" approach and most people have neither the time nor the talent.
Hackers go after value targets which are companies or organizations holding a lot of valuable data. My little home server with social media, XMPP, Home Assistant and Nextcloud for pictures and such is not something they can do anything with. Good enough security is built into most self-hosting platforms.
I predict a correlation between small self-hosting projects and more entries on shodan.io. Your small home server is probably secure enough... Probably. But you're the sort of person that posts on a site called "hacker news..." How much should we trust the average soul to do the bare minimum to not get owned? Do we imagine they're checking in regularly on https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1723... ?
Not sure how anyone who understands how Internet works could claim Google is in any way trusted, or trustworthy. Or has any reputation it could lose by a mere data leak.
Contrast that with, well, gestures widely to most of the Internet. While Google's security model is "We secure your data," so the trust interface between the end-user and Google is significant, Google for their part does an execllent job holding tightly to that data. If anything, the biggest risk working with Google is losing access to your own data because they stop believing you are you, not some third party getting your data out of Google's clutches.