[southerntofu]

> It was never a good idea to host a public site on one's personal computer

You could run it in a VM, which is equivalent to what your 20$ host is doing. Or you could run it on a separate machine. Or you can run it on the same machine which was common back in the day... if you use a reputable distro and apply updates regularly then it's really not a concern (i can't remember myself or anyone i know hacked through vulnerable packages, except for Worpress but that's precisely because it's not packaged by Debian).

> 20$ a month doesn't sound too bad

Doesn't it? I guess it's a matter of age and class and nationality. If you're too young to earn money, it's a barrier. If you're in the lower classes of your country, 20$/month can be a lot (that's like food for 30 days for one person). If you're in a "poor" country (i.e. neo-colony depleted of its resources by global north countries), 20$/month can even be considered a decent monthly income.

> buying a separate server

That's the thing. You usually don't have to buy it. It's old hardware lying around or that someone will donate for the purpose of running fun projects.

[yyyk]

>Doesn't it? I guess it's a matter of age and class and nationality. If you're too young to earn money, it's a barrier. If you're in the lower classes of your country, 20$/month can be a lot

I was comparing the payment to buying or operating a server (even a free old server has costs, e.g. for electricity). In truth, a proper modern comparison should be to a free plan from one of the cloud providers which is likely to be 0/month.

[southerntofu]

> I was comparing the payment to buying or operating a server (even a free old server has costs, e.g. for electricity)

Sure, but if the machine is already running, it's free. Or if you can stick it in a cupboard at work/university, it's free.

> 0/month

is there actually free cloud hosting? don't they ask for your credit card first before they offer you "credits"?

[yyyk]

>Sure, but if the machine is already running, it's free.

It still has costs for admin and electricity (via extra CPU load), though I grant these could be marginal.

>Or if you can stick it in a cupboard at work/university, it's free.

This is using someone else's resources, rather dubiously ethical. I suspect IT is going to have a fit when they find out - assuming they didn't block the relevant ports in the first place.

>is there actually free cloud hosting? don't they ask for your credit card first before they offer you "credits"?

There are free plans on Azure/AWS/GCP. Asking for credit card data does not mean you are being charged, I suspect it's really more about identifying users.

It's possible to set up free plans without credit card if one has some other id (e.g. Azure's free plans via MSDN). A prepaid card should work as well.

[lifeslikethis]

Honestly, I think self-hosted is the way to go. Most cloud hosting services are scams, and with self-hosted you have full control over the system.