I use a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian for things like these. It's a really cheap one-time cost (ignoring power costs, which are fairly minor), and you can setup all sorts of things on it. If you don't need high availability, running a small system at home can often be a good solution.

The initial learning curve for running your own system is a bit higher, but I think it's well worth learning. Once you have the system up and running you start finding all sorts of uses for it. So if you need it for just one thing it might not be worth it, but as you start doing more things with it I think it really pays off.