I started, like many others, around 2003, with an old Pentium 1 that my uncle was about to throw away.
I put it under my bed, I installed Slackware on it (it was still the time when it took about 11 floppy disks to get it installed), started playing with Apache+PHP, I used to run a quite popular software development forum on it, later expanded it with a wiki, links to my projects (Github wasn't around yet) and a small hack game.
Two decades later, I still run my own web server in my room. I wouldn't put big publicly-accessible websites on it (I don't want my bandwidth at home to drop because somebody is downloading a lot of images or videos), a couple of Linode instances do a better work handling that use case. But I do use it to run my personal blog, my Nextcloud instance, my mopidy-iris frontend for playing music in the house, my Jellyfin server to stream my media wherever I am, my Miniflux server to keep track of the RSS feeds and podcasts I follow, Ubooquity to keep a collection of my ebooks, and much more. It used to run on a RPi, now I've upgraded it to a mini pc with 8 GB of RAM and 10 TB of physical storage attached.
It does really feel like it's your own space, in your own house, accessible from anywhere, with no storage limits and with nobody who can show you a bill for the storage, bandwidth or CPU that you consumed.
I put it under my bed, I installed Slackware on it (it was still the time when it took about 11 floppy disks to get it installed), started playing with Apache+PHP, I used to run a quite popular software development forum on it, later expanded it with a wiki, links to my projects (Github wasn't around yet) and a small hack game.
Two decades later, I still run my own web server in my room. I wouldn't put big publicly-accessible websites on it (I don't want my bandwidth at home to drop because somebody is downloading a lot of images or videos), a couple of Linode instances do a better work handling that use case. But I do use it to run my personal blog, my Nextcloud instance, my mopidy-iris frontend for playing music in the house, my Jellyfin server to stream my media wherever I am, my Miniflux server to keep track of the RSS feeds and podcasts I follow, Ubooquity to keep a collection of my ebooks, and much more. It used to run on a RPi, now I've upgraded it to a mini pc with 8 GB of RAM and 10 TB of physical storage attached.
It does really feel like it's your own space, in your own house, accessible from anywhere, with no storage limits and with nobody who can show you a bill for the storage, bandwidth or CPU that you consumed.