I bought a cheap PC built at the local "reuse center" about 12 years ago and it is my home server; i bought some server drives to make a ZFS array and I've replaced it and added a NVIDIA 1050 card but it is still going strong as my home server and runs plex and a bunch of other things -- a cron job turns on the smart plug attached my coffee maker just before my wake time, for instance.

I haven't had an actual server, VPS or cloud instance running full time since about that time. Everything I have outside the house is built on serverless tech such as AWS Lambda.