I really have to wonder about the amount of time to setup your own servers. I like to setup and tweak hardware for fun. But the time and starting costs seems way too much compared to spinning up a few instances to get something going quickly. Looking around here, San Francisco bay area, I can't find any way to host a server as inexpensively and as quickly as I can on the cloud. Plus there are lots of alternatives to AWS which promise better performance.

BTW, tweaking around with servers can also be a major time sink.