But using that then I think it would be more than feasible to do it from your home network if you have a fast enough upload link.
$85/month is a lot of money, but given the number of services he runs on his server, each service now costs roughly $3/month, lower than the price of the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet.
I have a server @home with Plex and few other services that are used mostly by myself and close relatives. Not something very public. It runs on a second-hand i7 NUC which is almost silent unless someone needs transcoding on content read from Plex. But it's "no warranty" services.
And I rent a $20 server at OVH on which I put more public stuff. Like blog for myself or others and for which I don't want to be linked _directly_. For instance a friend's blog was under attack because some people didn't shared her ideas. I was covered by OVH's anti-DDOS. If it had been on my home server, I probably would had some _troubles_. Same goes for the seedbox hosted on it. I don't have to set a VPN and put safety in place to make sure that not a single bit of data from the seedbox is shared without the VPN. I just run it exposing the public IP of the server and don't care. Worst case scenario is OVH taking down the server after (many) abuse reports.
TLDR: You can self-host without your ISP knowing!