It can also run directly on lower powered machines. GL.iNet routers are a good example, they’re based on OpenWrt and come with AdGuard Home support out of the box, so no need for a whole external computer to handle DNS stuff. Sure it’s limited by ram about how many lists you can have, but still. Pihole is much more “substantial”

How is that ghetto lol. Now, I’d understand if you were like me with a crusty ass laptop in the corner of my room 2500km away from me, running some Linux and 4 external hard drives, but Xeon and ghetto?

Docker is the way to go. More often than not self-hosted stuff already has docker instructions, and by design it doesn’t mount your entire drive or give access to really anything on your system unless defined explicitly, even networks are isolated iirc. OP, get educated on what docker is and what flags it has so you can easily see what has access to what before even spinning something up.

I can confirm, I’m running the exact same scenario OP described (GPT-4 Telegram bot), on Oracle Cloud, and it works great. I found this implementation to be robust, easy to spin up, and easy enough to patch changes in.

Personally I don’t trust Proton. I know I’m paranoid, but can’t be too sure about anything these days. To my knowledge MV and IVPN are the only ones with a nice privacy reputation. Shame they are cutting port forwarding