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.
Try putting an RSS reader on their like FreshRSS! Or a bookmark manager such as LinkAce! Start your own personal wiki/knowledge base with BookStack! Try deploying them natively, then learn how awesome docker is and put them into a compose file. Add wireguard into the mix so your services can only be accessed via a VPN.
Now get yourself a domain if you don’t already have one. Pro tip if you want to maximize the cheapness of your setup, you can get a .xyz domain for .99 cents a year! Just has to be funny numbers, but find some numbers that has meaning and its not bad. Now that you have a domain, put those bad boys in a subdomain. Tired of those pesky browser errors? Time to setup a reverse proxy and get yourself an HTTPS cert. Caddy is brain dead easy to do this.