I install WinDirStat on all my machines, including my business servers. Super useful!
But yes, slow. Seems like Wiztree did the trick for the OP and solved their weird problem!
I guess it depends how often you use it. I found it a nice tool every few months or when free space took and unusual dip. It’s amazing how many people make a backup copy of “that project folder” and then forget it’s there. Repeatedly. Until a year later when there’s no space. I did also find at one time the server liked to build up a huge number of temp files for some actions.
Yes, for smaller businesses, with current high speed internet, it makes more sense to move to someone else’s datacenter instead of worrying about service patches and RAID disk failures. Indeed, the medium is the message - what the server operating system consists of is fairly irrelevant to most smaller businesses, they just want data storage, some enterprise apps, and desktop functionality. The desktops tend to be Windows because that’s what people are familiar with.
Nobody cares what the actual mechanism behind the serve shares is, or how the enterprise program function (more and more, some form of web server; indeed, some providers were moving from “install this in your main server” to “connect to our web service and get your own private instance”. It eliminated a lot of tech support, walking people through patch installs, upgrades, and data recovery, and ensured everyone was on the same version.
But yeah, the problem - whether it’s home services like Netflix or Peleton or servers like AWS - the bean counters will keep the price low until you’re hooked and then raise it. Even Microsoft - they practically gave away Windows Server until they’d pushed Novell out of the picture, then they tightened the screws. No surprise if cloud computing does the same.
We haven’t begun to see the panic of “How do we move our business from AWS to Microsoft Cloud” yet… I’m sure it’s an emerging issue, but at least bandwidth is cheaper now. I remember years ago telling the sales guys “the online backup option is not good for some clients - a week to upload a full server backup on DSL is not practical.”