There’s a large group of folks here that swear by renting a VPS. A common argument is that when you fully self host and expose anything to the internet (incoming connections), you’ve always got some security risk you might not know exists.

A VPS offloads a lot of the low level security concerns to someone else (it’s the whole cloud sales pitch) and if someone breaks in, there’s little for them to steal (assuming you’re not putting anything personal and sensitive on the VPS).

The nice thing is that you can start with a small and cheap VPS and set things up and decide if you even want to self host, or to what extent. Then you have data to make a decision as to whether you need to upgrade to a better VPS, or port your setup to a local server (which you can now buy with a good idea of what sort of specs it should have).

On the flip side, you could also self host on whatever computer you have laying around (leave the laptop open) and play with some services there. If you decide you want to open it to the internet, you could just as easily port your local playground to a VPS and keep going.

I don’t think there’s anything in the self hosting world that really paints you into a corner.