[h0bb3z]

Have you checked out the resources in https://www.reddit.com/r/homelabsales/

There are usually some good deals on used gear and things suitable for selfhosting if you want to go that route. I was able to build a 3 node cluster with lots of CPU/RAM (~100 vCPU/256G RAM) and storage (30+TB) on systems with redundant power supplies made for datacenters for under $500.

Upside: one time cost and usually cheaper than cloud-hosting costs.

Downside: power consumption (energy bill) increase unless you go with something like a Pi cluster, and you need to setup security well if you intend to expose any services to the Internet.