Between the port forwarding and security and other kinds of hassles of running a server in your own house, I just used digitalocean hosting for a minecraft server for my kid a few years ago, $5 a month. Here's a script to install the Cuberite version mentioned in the article: https://github.com/cuberite/cuberite-ocean
Now there are free services like Gamocosm which shut down your digitalocean server when not using it, so that it might only cost $1 or so a month: https://gamocosm.com/
Meaning it would take 8 years before it cost as much as a Mineserver box.
Also curious, as I ran a $10 droplet to host a Terraria server and the ping-times were >200ms from Vancouver, BC to San Fran. Was basically unplayable, with usage spiking out. Now, it was simultaneously hosting Mumble and an (effectively blank) node site, but still.
For what it's worth, I also hosted a Starbound server, and so long as people weren't doing anything crazy and the population never exceeded ~4-5, things were fine.
$5 plan on DO for Minecraft? That Cuberite software better be awesome, because I ended up buying an 8 core 16GB RAM HP rack server just to run a heavy-modded Forge server.
Now there are free services like Gamocosm which shut down your digitalocean server when not using it, so that it might only cost $1 or so a month: https://gamocosm.com/ Meaning it would take 8 years before it cost as much as a Mineserver box.