I'm curious, with shared servers at Digital Ocean available for $5 or $10 per month, why run a home server anymore? What is the value to having it local?
I've been considering this calculation for a year or so now. I spend an average of $20/mo on small VMs for testing (including the occasional $1/hr VMs for a couple of hours for heavy loads).
I thought I should replace my 2012 Mac Mini (HTPC) with a modern Hackintosh and 6c/12t or 8c/16t and do my testing workloads on that (or even just use my current 2c/4t for small workloads). But it's just so easy to spin up DO droplets within seconds and do so programmatically. Plus you can snapshot and create droplets from those, and turn on backups if you need to.
