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> Why isn't there an easy way to utilize my unused hardware for my production servers

There are lots of easy ways to do it. It would take less than an hour to setup depending on how you wanted to configure it (longer if you were going to colo it).

Managing your own hardware does come with tradeoffs though. If it's not already clear how to do this the tradeoffs may not be very pleasant.

With AWS or other cloud providers you're in large part paying for convenience (as well as reliability and a few other odds and ends).

If you don't mind a learning experience though, there is nothing wrong with using them this way. Understand it will be a learning experience though, probably with associated downtime as you learn.