Usually, I’d aim for the cloud environments for public resources (serving more than like 20 people), as the traffic won’t be hitting your home network.
Additionally, selfhosting a public service like Lemmy on your home environment probably wouldn’t have the same uptime or reliability, as I only have one strong ISP signal, and no backup generator.
However, pricing wise, selfhosting at home is much cheaper for the processing power you get.
I go back and forth on this because I can get “unlimited” data transfer for $30/mo. But I’m sure my service provider would not be happy if they found out I was hosting a public server. Then again, if it’s just a single user instance, it’s kind of a grey area I would imagine.
Anyway, I do host nextcloud and some other services on my home network, but they are all hidden behind a VPN to limit access.