I wouldn't suggest hosting publicly open services from own local network. Without proper maintenance and experience, this is asking for trouble imo. VPSes are so cheap these days (far cheaper than 10$ if you don't need much performance), I'd recommend leaving local network out of the question.

When searching for cheap VPS, I usually peruse https://www.serverhunter.com/

I think it's a useful exercise in simple port forwarding, proxying (via nginx, for example), and certificate management. So long as you're not serving port 80 beyond redirecting to 443 and those are the only two ports being forwarded to the pi, it's really not that risky.

I'm hosting my blog and my private Ghidra server on my Synology NAS. The NAS and the ISP router are already always-on, so it "only" costs me ~20€/year for a domain name.

Even accounting for the electricity and network I'm going to use anyways, it's quite cheap.

Completely agree. Use a raspberry pi or just run a VM on your desktop. Do your initial learning on something contained in your home network before you experiment (and potentially get compromised) on the internet.

> host something small on your home network

I came to suggest the same thing. Another comment raised a good point about rpi vs a tiny x86—ARM may introduce some extra hurdles.

At the end of the day, especially when dealing with network configuration and security, you're going to make mistakes and get locked out. Having physical keyboard access can be a lifesaver and is how many of us "retro" people got started with linux administration

It might be "retro" in the sense that it isn't the primary way most businesses host their services, but I still don't think there is any better way to actually learn the ins and outs of networking and server management early on than to have non-obfuscated control and responsibility for everything you're doing.

I started with Linux by paying 5$/month for a Linode server, and I’ve never regretted it. I’m all for setting up your own hardware as well at some point, but it’s a different experience from having a server with 100% uptime to play with.

Thanks for the great suggestion! I think I'll start with the hosted server and then move to this.

I've been burnt too many times (by myself), buying domain names and arduinos and cool things I never got around to using .-.