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.
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.