I published my first site about five years ago. At first, I used the free hosting platform Infinityfree that has multiple limitations and was unavailable from time to time, then I moved to cheap Hostbudget hosting. It was really awesome. All that tools for managing e-mail, instaling software in one click, SEO, and so on were so great after free service.
But not long ago I’ve reached limits on databases, because I deployed there photo and music servers, blog and three my own sites. Also it was a huge pain for me transferring data back and forth, because speed on server was slow. So I started consider to make my own server. It was just a thoughts, until I found an article about server on Raspberry Pi. I started to google about portable computers more and found that you could have tiny server now. I decided to try with cheep option and bought used nettop on Avito site: ASRock ION 300
With delivery fees, HDMI cable and wired mouse it costs me 60 USD, and now I have my own hosting, while average price for the same configuration on market is about 7 USD per month. Looks like a good deal.
However, it takes some time to maintain it, and static IP costs me 1.5 usd per month. But now I understand web infrastructure a little bit better and it worth much more than 60 dollars.