Sure, but $5/month is still $60/year. You could probably buy a new Raspberry Pi every year and pay for its electricity for that kind of money.

(This assumes you already have an internet connection at home, of course)

^ This exactly. A half-decent used Thinkpad can be picked up for slightly north of $120. And it will have 4-8x RAM and at least 4-5x CPU performance. And you own it! The only thing you potentially miss out on is: uptime SLAs ("reliability") and a higher-speed internet connection.

You also might miss out on a public IPv4 address, but that's whole 'nother issue... FRP (fast reverse proxy) is a decent workaround for this.

Now take into account electricity costs. Where I live, running a Lenovo constantly @10w for a year would cost me $30. Then you avg the remaining lifetime of your laptop (5yrs) and the time you spent setting it up and you will find out, a $5 droplet is a cheaper option ;-)

Fair point, it depends on your workload a lot. If you're hosting a few static sites, a droplet _might_ be a better option. Previously, I was paying an arm and a leg for $90 worth of droplets a month to cope with my remote-compile applications. Plus, I don't pay for electricity at my current apartment. It's included in my rent, so I'm really paying for the electricity whether or not I use it (within limits).

You can get some give away from your employer.

I bought a Dell precision 4600m (3rd gen i7, 4c8t, 16gb ram, 480gb ssd + 750gb hard disk) for 50€+vat.

It was taking the dust on a shelf.

It's perfect as a low end home server.

Depends what you are serving. If you are going to host low traffic blog or site, that can go unpredictably offline and be offline for days, this is OK.

I was doing this for some time and all the nuances with it (assuming electricity and internet are cheap, which isn't the case) makes it still unprofitable on the long run. ISPs usually have really bad upload, port blacklist (e.g. irc), connection unexpectedly drops during the night or day, DNS resolvers or forwarders usually are miss-configured and so on. Support for requests outside "my internet is not working" is often zero (e.g. "your DNS isn't configured properly").

I didn't even start with DDoS (ssh, http) attacks, port scans and even crawler hits (some crawlers by even reputable search engines can be nasty) - all these things will eat your monthly quota without even serving a byte of your site to human visitor. And don't forget visitor impatience these days - if site isn't loaded under a second or two, no more visits :)

I use a cheap VPS provider and I pay $10/year... there are cheaper ones: http://www.lowendstock.com/

This was my thoughts going into it, unfortunately a static ip turned out to cost around the same where I live. :(

Maybe you don't need a static IP, though? If it only changes occasionally, you can just run a small program that checks periodically for those changes and updates the DNS records when it does. I've done that (using Cloudflare as the DNS server) and it worked just fine, the downtime was minimal.

If you're serving 100K+ impressions/day, you probably make a lot more than $5/month from it.

I am not really good setting up my own server. I would do that, but i am a designer.