[mattl]

I used to beg people I met online to host pages for me, give me shell access, etc. I was a child in the very early 90s with basically no money.

[wastedhours]

The same, in fact my life would be very different if a random guy from (I think Kansas, given I'm from the UK) on a forum bought me a domain and gave me a slice of his dedicated hosting when I was mid-teens.

I've always wanted to pay it forward in the same way, but lots of things on the web seem overly complicated now that'd make that hard to do, and I've lost attachment to most communities.

[mauricedenassau]

It's not very common, but I had people begging my friends for this kind of services.

[flingo]

raspberrry pi in home-network DMZ, with fail2ban, unattended-upgrades, and a free dynamic DNS service gets you most of this. (plus, you're root, so you can run things more complicated than web-services)