Unfortunately, where I am, prices aren’t that generous, but I have an unusual interest in very old hardware, so most of my servers can be bought for like $20 or less. Most of them are junk hardware nobody needs. They’re very useful for many cases, especially if we talk self-hosting / personal servers. I bet you can easily serve a small community with a $20 computer. Recently, I started being very picky about power consumption (we have massive blackouts here in Ukraine, due to the Nazi terrorist state, Russia, shelling our civilian infrastructure; but not just that: power efficient hardware is better for the planet), but one thing that isn’t obvious: you can keep the hardware off when unused. It’s trivial to turn it on, or wake up, depending on the use case.

So, if anyone new reading this, I urge you to try this with any spare computer you can find. You may be surprised how good it may work with Linux (server or even desktop).