[theblackcat1002]

I think this works for university student when 99.99% uptime isn't your highest priority. My university has static IP and near 700 up/down speed to each dormitory. So by investing in an old workstation I can easily work on various ideas and built MVP for it. I finally ended up running a crawler service for months before I migrated to a vps.

[rileyphone]

You can't really do NAT traversal on a university network though, so it's pretty useless for servers.

[dillonmckay]

Each dorm student at my university had a public IP assigned to them.

I also remember downloading quite a bit of MP3s hosted on an SFTP server in a friend of friend’s dorm in Philadelphia.

[TheSmiddy]

Can get a $5 vps and set it up as a reverse proxy and vpn host then vpn to it from your locally hosted server to get around that. Not "free" but this method allows you to use whatever fancy hardware you have which would be significantly cheaper than an equivalent vps.