At one point a few years ago I was paying $280 a month to run my sites...as a hobby.
Granted, I was wanting to play around with "big iron" and setting up VPS instances for each of my sites.
When you have a set amount of money devoted to your hobby each month, you have to decide where to allocate it. I have since re-allocated the majority of it to hardware purchases for the niche I am involved in. I decided why run a dedicated server and have all the headaches of maintaining it when I can get a decent VPS for much less.