While hosting anything that's too serious in your garage probably isn't a great idea- I've hosted stuff at non-traditional places before and been just fine. Not

While hosting anything that's too serious in your garage probably isn't a great idea- I've hosted stuff at non-traditional places before and been just fine. Nothing of ours is mission critical that I'm doing this with. We've got a rack at a local university that's in a large (8x10) closet with its own power, HVAC and fire suppression. The facility is fairly secure and you'd have to know two layers of door codes to get in there. Yet we've got 6 servers in a rack. The servers in total cost us around $3000 (could have done it for less, but one of them we bought new and went overkill on), and we pay nothing for monthly hosting. If you sniff around local universities, you can likely find someone that is cool with you throwing something in their rack for free or cheap. I know many of the dorms at MIT have several 42U racks on each floor and people throw stuff in those all the time. I know of others that have cheap hosting for affiliated members. Time to call your alma mater?