the egress by itself isnāt that expensive, but when one starts to add the costs of the infrastructure to make it work all the time, crew, hardware maintenance , hardware redundancy, internet, internet redundancy, power cost, power redundancy, install, catastrophic fails, natural disasters.
so after a new company tried to do their own IT a few times, with bad results they often just end up paying for all the potential issues to be handled by somebody else⦠and really centralizing or decentralizing into a cloud solution can mitigate a lot of costsā¦
ofc at certain sizes it has been natural that companies eventually start branching out or building their foundational infrastructure, to reduce overhead costs and thus build their own data centers.
ofc today cloud might end up making the conventional data center obsolete in some regards, because there are many advantages of decentralized solutions⦠tho i suspect something like cold storage will always continue to be a datacenter thing⦠or atleast until something drastic changes in technology.
datacenters are essentially the digital version of factories / mass production⦠and we all see everyday just how cheap mass production and outsourcing can make stuffā¦
so in some aspects we as cloud providers cannot compete, however against stuff like natural disasters, power outages, internet outages, hardware failures and such cloud is the superior solutionā¦
maybe even bandwidth⦠but that gets into the nitty gritty details of internet data transfers, which lets face it⦠most donāt understand, even if they like to⦠i sure donāt⦠i mean understand the whole network deal and down to fairly specific details⦠but i also know that there will be layers upon layer of methods to optimize and coordinate bandwidth, as to keep less strain on stuff like the transatlantic cables⦠those puppies arenāt cheap 
like when we say we understand how a cpu works⦠it computes
yeah⦠damn map of the things are the size of big cities⦠lol can be explained in a word and yet takes a life time to truly understand⦠maybeā¦
a bit of a tangent there, but what i was trying to say was that, seen from an economical perspective of certain companies stuff like storj or cloud in general can be very advantageousā¦