I've been building my home PC's since I was in elementary school, and have built servers for work before, and so I almost entirely agree with you. The prices of cloud hosting seem to be outrageous (even just cloud data -- google drive, which is the cheapest option, is about 6x per year the cost of just buying drives when comparing 1TB option). However, while I've always been able to find the time for maintenance, and always had fun doing the labour, I've always ended up with issues with network bandwidth. In the case of data storage, there is also an argument for better accessibility since those services usually come with mobile access, os/browser plugins, and all sorts of web api's etc. Anyway, its really hard to evaluate options sometimes, but your point that building locally isn't impossible is spot on. Advise that I've been given is to run servers locally for the every-day workload, but make sure you have a scalable cloud backup plan in case usage jumps through the roof, or disaster strikes, and pay the prices only for those cases.