+1 for Mikrotik.
Get one of their routers that have an Arm or x86 processor and you can run PiHole and a DDNS updater on there as containers. Wireguard support (client and server) is built in.
Even their cheapest hardware that runs routerOS has access to all the same features as their enterprise level gear.
Spent a full day setting up Nextcloud so I could file sync my machines and share files externally. It was slow as hell and didn’t work half the time.
Spent 10 minutes spinning up Syncthing and FileBrowser containers and have had zero issues with them since.
The Oracle Cloud VPS only has SSH key authentication enabled by default. You can also set it to only allow SSH from your home IP in the virtual firewall before the machine is ever spun up.
Their current free ARM offering is 1 machine with 4-cores and 24gb RAM for life. You can also add another 2 AMD machines with 1-core and 1gb RAM and still be in their free-tier.
If you’re going to set it up and take advantage of the ARM machine, make sure you pick a home location for your account that has multiple availability zones. San Fran right now only has 1 zone, so if the shared ARM instances are all used up, you’ll have to wait a few days and try again. Phoenix I think has 3, so you can try with another zone right away.
Using a Pi3b to run AdGuard Home and a TailScale subnet router.
I’ve got another Pi3b running Octoprint/Klipper for a 3d printer, but I’m currently migrating that to Mainsail running on an old SFF PC so I can run multiple printers with Klipper off the same PC.
The rest of my stack is on an actual server running UnRaid with like 50tb raw storage.
I will say that TailScale has been annoying asf with their subnet router setup not actually forcing the correct DNS for AdGuard Home so I can have ad-blocking while away from home. I had to move back to a pure Wireguard setup directly on my router for DNS to work properly.
Pretty sure most hosting platforms have egress costs on their cheaper VM instances.
I know Google cloud charges for bandwidth to AUS, and Oracle is 10TB of egress per month before charging (which I think is the most generous of free/cheap hosting platforms).