I’ve been doing this off Windows PCs for over a decade now. I personally think professional grade servers are way overkill for this and will suck up a ton of energy for little benefit compared to consumer grade hardware.

Realistically you’re going to maybe be serving between a couple and couple dozen people at most, charging little to nothing for access, and hosting data that isn’t critical for anything, so having perfect uptime and loads of redundancy isn’t necessary.

In my experience, what is critical is setting everything up on an OS designed for this kind of work (which isn’t Windows) as that’s what’s caused me grief over the years and not anything to do with the hardware itself. I’m actually planning on rebuilding everything (leaning more toward doing little more than upgrading my OS, CPU, and RAM on hardware from 2018) and just posted about this a few days ago.

Even a lightweight, micro office PC or laptop with a mobile processor would work fine for this power wise, but lacks the ports and HDD mounting space to do the job well.