Lot of sales for 4th of july (and ongoing ones) where you can pay $10-$14 for a YEAR of a small cheap VPS. Usually only has 1GB of memory, but that’s plenty to play around with and learn. If nothing else, a good cheap ipv4 you can use for some port forwarding. There are lots of options, but I’ve used racknerd and ethernetservers which have been fine.
I have my own server at home, but I bought two small ones to start learning Ansible with in a risk free way. Eventually plan to redo my main server with a complete Ansible setup, really want to hop on that “infrastructure as code” train.
What OS? I run a Linux router that when the IP changes it just updates the DNS record. Worst case I’m down for 5 minutes. But have never noticed anything.
Oh my server is running through cloudflare tunnel so im not affected by ip change at all. Im actually running default ISPs router it’s actually pretty nice and does the job for me.