You can. I am lucky enough to not have been hacked after about a year of this, and I use a server in the living room. There are plenty of guides online for securing a server. Use common sense, and also look up threat modeling. You can also start hosting things locally and only host to the interwebs once you learn a little more. Basically, the idea that you need cloudflare and aws to not get hacked is because of misleading marketing.