It’s not a bad idea if your ISP gives you a static IP and you’ve got some spare hardware lying around (just in case closing your laptop causes downtime). If you can isolate that box from the rest of your home network, even better.
Personally I’ve been using $3 Lightsail instances on AWS. There’s a lot you can do with one CPU and half a gig of RAM. An MVP Rails app will squeeze into that easily enough.
Even without a static IP, a free dynamic DNS service is good enough to prototype on a local machine as long as you aren’t using enough bandwidth to tip off your ISP. At that point, however, you’ve probably got enough market validation to move to another host.
Cloudflare free tier is really good for that :-)
Since all traffic ends in Cloudflare you can change an IP address and it redirects the traffic in seconds whithout having to wait for dns propagation.
Try it.
Personally I’ve been using $3 Lightsail instances on AWS. There’s a lot you can do with one CPU and half a gig of RAM. An MVP Rails app will squeeze into that easily enough.