For s3 iDrive e2 is cheaper. It costs 4$ per month, if you pay monthly and down to ca 3$, if you pay yearly.
The egress policy is mostly the same as backblaze. You get 3 times the storage you pay for. With backblaze you get 3 times the average amount of data you have stored.
I use a folder sync app, to upload all my pictures from my phone to a directory on my server, which PhotoPrism imports from every 15 mins(Might be a bit more or less).
I have used it for a couple of years and it has worked fine for me.
Thank you for clarifying(and sorry for the late answer).
For you (and anyone interested) I will answer the questions you asked.
Are you going to close upon any legal threat, or only upon a certain degree or size of threat?
If the legal threat is real(they have a real chance to win in a court) and there is nothing I could do(come to an agreement, move the hosting to another server etc), then I would close the server.
From the US only, or from any country?
Server is hosted in Germany
Will you close instantly, or will you guarantee a Minimum Survivability Timeframe for eg.: helping users to migrate away, like Mastodon’s covenant does?
As long as there aren't fines for keeping the website up or I get arrested, I would give a notice, so users can move to another server.
Lemmy.world does a great job(with a little downtime) and it is the same software we are hosting, so I can only see a couple of ways to make a better "offering"
Better uptime as you mentioned
Different deferation/moderation policy.
Visual customizations(eg. different theme)
I try to provide a better uptime and a different deferation/moderation policy. I don't have the skills to make visual customizations, but I have added multiple frontends(like lemmy.world).
I'm open to suggestions/ideas if there is anything else that could be done to improve the "offering".
As an alternative to lemmy.world I would like to suggest my own instance endlesstalk.org.
I have no plans to deferate or ban anything releated to piracy. Only thing that might change my mind would probably be a company taking legal action against me.
I also strive to have as little downtime as possible and keep everything running smoothly.
I prioritize uptime and have setup monitoring to notify, if anything goes down(See here). I have no problem banning/defederating Nazi's and the like, but I generally don't take action unless, an instance/users aren''t following the rules. I'm open for requests and discussion though.
Currently I'm the only admin, but I'm in the process of changing the setup of the site, so other admins would be able to fix the site, if anything should happen.
My instance endlesstalk.org is hosted in Germany via Hetzner, so that should fit the bill.
Defederations are only done, when it would have a negative effect on the instance's users, but I'm always open to discuss, if anyone disagrees with a deferation.
If you have the ability then self hosting is the best option
Otherwise I think instances with less users and content will be quicker, but then the all feed will probably be smaller.
I will also recommend my own instance endlesstalk.org. It is very small(10 users) and the server is located in Germany. Hopefully that is close to where you live, so the latency is low.
It is on my to-do list, but it would take some work to add support for multiple people to have access to everything required and I would also need a lot more documentation, than I currently have.
Yeah, I have also seen an increase in registrations on my instance as well.