TL;DR: Using an old Raspberry Pi hosted at home in conjunction with CloudFlare and DuckDNS as $1/yr web hosting.
After cPanel hiked its prices, the hosting company I've been using went out of business. I looked for some shared hosting options. They ranged from $30 to $60 a year. That's much more than I want to pay (especially coming from a much better deal with my previous host). My solution is to host them at home on a Raspberry Pi.
I chose a Pi as my hardware versus a spare laptop, since a laptop would cost me at least $30 in electricity in a year. The Pi on the other hand will cost about $1 in electricity. The problem with hosting at home is my IP address will change from time to time. So I had to get a little creative.
I setup DuckDNS to track my IP address. http://example.duckdns.org points to my home IP address and there's a cron job on my Pi that updates my DuckDNS account every 5 minutes. So when my IP address changes, http://example.duckdns.org gets updated automatically.
I pointed my name servers (in my domain registrar's settings) to CloudFlare so it can handle my DNS. Plus, there are a bunch of other benefits (handles SSL, CDN, blocks know malicious IPs). Especially useful is the "Always Online" feature which serves up my site from their cache when my home internet goes down. And lastly, since CloudFlare is proxying my site, I'm able to setup my Pi's firewall (I'm using UFW) to block all incoming connections except those on port 80 coming from CloudFlare (they provides a list of their IPs that I whitelisted).
In CloudFlare, I have two DNS settings. A CNAME for www(.example.com) that points to http://example.duckdns.org. So when someone visits my site, www.example.com, the traffic is sent to my Pi (proxied through CloudFlare). The issue is that I can't setup a CNAME for my root domain, example.com. To get around that, I added a DNS A record that points to a random IP (I chose 8.8.8.8). Then I added a CloudFlare Page Rule that redirects any traffic for example.com/* to https://www.example.com.
The setup took me about a day. So there's some time cost there since it would have taken me about an hour to get the sites setup on shared hosting. But I enjoyed the process and love that I'm saving money with some workarounds.
@x0rsw1tch pointed out to me that some registrars have DDNS capabilities. That would simplify my setup. I wouldn't need DuckDNS. Though I'd need to setup a new DDNS script to update my registrar instead. I also wouldn't need the CloudFlare Page Rule to redirect non-www to www. And, if I wanted, I could easily make my root domain my default and redirect www traffic to the root domain instead.