An interesting alternative for data storage:
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
The problem is - they charge $0.01 per downloaded GB. Currently, only registered users can download images/videos uploaded to the forum. If big files are saved somewhere, it would be very difficult to control the access. If the current traffic is 500GB/month, it will be at least 2TB. In the example above the calculated price is:
Initial upload: 100GB
Uploaded per month: 20GB
Downloaded per month: 2TB
Annually: $253 (I think it's without VAT, so most likely it will be $300)
So, theoretically, storage-wise B2 is cheaper, than Linode (or similar VPS hosters), but the total costs will be still around $1000 per year.