Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a 'Know Your Customer' regime for companies operating cloud services, with the goal of countering the activities of "foreign malicious actors." Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won't be able to avoid the proposal's requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others.
Costs depend on a lot of factors. If you are technically adept you might be able to get away with 20 bucks a month for the whole setup but most folks wouldn’t imo. I also have some old hardware I was able to use and upgraded it. Initial invest for a homeserver varies greatly depending on who you know.
If you want to know more please ask. You can also hit me up on matrix. Link in bio.
I did a similar setup for my own cloud on several Raspberry Pis (one master and two backup devices). The backups are placed offsite and sync the entire content of the master device. The next step I want to try now is running a Proxmox cluster (on x86) that now only syncs contents but also provides identical copies in a high availability setup (like a "real" cloud would).
Thats actually not a bad idea. Long term selfhosted cloud solutions will have to compete on availability/redundancy. You might want to help the NC folks to implement that on their docker setup or something?