Selfhosted

If you haven't checked out Tailscale, you should!

Re your vpn question - I have a number of services on my home server, some of which are exposed via reverse proxy (eg. Nextcloud) and others which are only accessible internally or via my wireguard vpn. Setting up a dedicated vpn server on raspberry pi is very simple to do.

At home I'm running proxmox on a Ryzen 9 3900X, 96GB of RAM with 4TB of NVME storage. I have VMs for a bunch of stuff, most importantly Unraid which is passed a SATA controller with 8 drives. Storage from unraid then mounted as NFS/SMB shares to various VMs.

What hardware do you run on? Or do you use a data center/cloud?

I have 2 home servers - an Intel NUC running Ubuntu and a Raspberry Pi running Raspberry Pi OS. The NUC is my main server and the rpi is a dedicated wireguard/pivpn.

Do you use containers or plain packages?

On the main server I use docker containers almost exclusively. I find them easier to stand up and tear down, particularly using scripts, without worrying about the broader OS.

I have the following services on the NUC -

• Nginx Proxy Manager (for https proxy)
• Nextcloud
• Airsonic
• Calibre-web
• Invidious
• h5ai
• transmission

I did play around with my own Lemmy instance but that was not successful and I found beehaw :-)

Orchestration tools like K8s or Docker Swarm?

No

How do you handle logs?

Badly. I lost a server due to root filling up a couple years back. Now I monitor disk space (see below) and prune logs as required.

How about updates?

OS updates I push daily. I don't regularly update my docker containers. I did use Watchtower for a while but found it broke stuff a little too often.

Do you have any monitoring tools you love?

Just some custom batch scripts (disk space, backups etc) which send me regular emails. I also have conky running on a small screen 24x7

At the end of the day, packets need to get from whatever your DNS points, to the server that's running. Depending on your tolerance for jank, and as long as a route actually exists for this, you can run the server anywhere you want. Renting a VPS does offer a lot more freedom in how your are routing, and where.

I currently host a few services (including the lemmy instance I am replying from) behind a commodity $5 VPS, while the services are actually hosted locally. I setup WireGuard to have a simple hard-coded peer-to-peer VPN connection from my local client to the remote VPS, and then setup some iptable rules on the VPS to redirect traffic to the VPN network. This allows me to host behind a NAT (my biggest issue), but also handles IP changes and hides your home's public IP. I am no networking engineer, so I am not sure how safe this is, manually routing packets can be tricky.

There are also a few services this does not work for. So far I've found CS:GO dedicated servers (if the public IP of the local machine differs from the VPS) and email servers cannot be behind a NAT to function properly. Other services likely exist, but you'll be able to run most services. You do lose the originating IP addresses in this case, which can complicate things (the case for email servers).

This process is explained in detail on wickedyoda.com and with a video tutorial.

Absolutely possible.
The key to simple self hosting is to have a dns record that points to your externally accessible IP, whether that be your real one or an external one hosted at a VPN provider.
If that IP changes, you'll need to update it dynamically.

It's becoming increasibly common to be a requirement to do so as CGNat becomes more widespread.

One of the newer ways to do that is with a Cloudflare Tunnel, which whilst technically is only for web traffic, they ignore low throughput usage for other things like SSH.

I just use wireguard with VyOS. Simple and efficient