If it didn't take so much effort to run _well_ I'd recommend everyone load up 1 kilowatt server racks to heat their homes in the winter.

But yes it's also a huge financial game lol. It took me about 12-15 years of learning hardware cycles and how to get used enterprise gear cheap and make the junk I have work.

I need to actually try hosting something. I am a bit worried that my firewall-fu will fall short of requirements against the IP pirates of the Internet.

It is easy to play without getting too hardware rich. I run tons of tiny services, just for my own home, from a tiny NUC. I did stick a 1TB nvme drive and 32 GB of ram in it. But using LXD containers I have things like my own git server, databases, management tools, game servers for the kids, etc. The hardest part was trunking the one NIC so I can run containers on different clans. I still don't really understand what I did or what cloud-init is and why it is used by my distro. But all you really need is a router, a managed switch, and some old computer that will run headless (the last is optional, you can get an HDMI dongle to fool an old laptop into thinking it has peripherals)