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.
It’s not as detectable as you think. One of the major things most VPS companies tout, is that the data is fully encrypted and private. So they aren’t scanning the files, or the running processes, or anything else about what is being done with the server.
So unless something external to the company is provided, which acts as proof, they won’t shut things down.
This is true for most providers but not the big big ones. Ask me how I know ;)
I’m curious if leaving the data-at-rest encrypted on the filesystem using something like EncFS would mostly solve this. (EncFS encrypts all the files on disk and gives you a mount point to access the corresponding cleartext filesystem)