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.
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)