Storage-based billing is huge, unless you mean something other than “places that make you pay for storage separately”.
Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a top line number for infra spend.
GitHub pre-Copilot was probably like that. They host a shitload of data, most of which is just at rest the majority of the time. Storage and networking are probably the majority of their infra costs.
Storage-based billing stories. When an account is hijacked it's always for compute, not storage.
Oh, I also don’t think I’ve ever seen that but I’m not surprised. Even if you could steal a huge amount of storage, filling it with data would take ages and the cat and mouse game of moving the data as hacks get uncovered would be untenable.
I have seen things get hacked for bandwidth, back in the days before you could rent a gbps uplink from the cloud for $0.12. Some scene release groups would hack into universities or companies to do the initial seeding over their super fast links. It used storage, but that wasn’t really the goal.