Courtesy of this video:
I became aware of https://zfs.rent, which are pretty much a hard drive colo operation–you buy a drive, ship it to them, and they put it in a bay in one of their servers, attached to a small VM. You pay them, currently, $10/mo for the drive bay,[1] VM, some bandwidth, etc. They don’t say anything about any start-up costs.
Install Ubuntu or Debian on the VM, create a pool (or import the pool that’s already on the disk you sent them), and you have a remote ZFS replication target.
No affiliation at all, not even (yet) as a customer, but thought it sounded interesting.
It seems the price is set to increase to $20/mo beginning 1 August 2026, but you can buy up to three years at the current $10/mo price. ↩︎