While they're cheap, should I really self-host on shared CPUs because that's all I can afford right now.
My basic system would be Pi-Hole, Miniflux, Linkding. Maybe Bitwarden.
What would be a good way to get started? Any suggestions are welcome.
You would be better off with a like-new Dell Wyse 5070 off ebay for ~100 (and occasionally less if you're patient). Supports up to 32GB ram and an M.2 SATA slot.
You'll have much better IO, stability, and capacity compared to RPI4 for not much more cost. Power envelope of the system is pretty similar, the 5070 idles around 5W and loaded down it goes up to ~15W and is fanless which is in the neighborhood of the pi.
It's what I did. It costs me less in electricity than a VPS but it's way more powerful.
The only thing I eventually bought was an UPS, because for some reason I regularly have micro power cuts at home.
I have it connected to a small UPS due to the occasional random brown-out in my neighborhood. The server only runs on the UPS for about 15 minutes, but during the rare substantial power outage, that's enough for me to power it down gently.
I also have a little desktop Lenovo PC I found cheap (used) at microcenter that I use as my primary zwave hub with a custom MQTT/JS based home automation script. This replaced a Raspberry Pi, which I loved, but after losing the storage a couple times, I no longer rely upon as a primary server
Also, there is a LOT of resource congestion for the arm systems. Be prepared to try every day to fire up new instances for a couple of weeks until you can find free capacity.
Pi-Hole and bitwarden are simple enough applications that you can host both of them on a pi. Plus there are plenty of guides available online to guide you thru the process if you do get stuck.
I got started with self-hosting pi-hole on a raspberry pi myself.
And it's nearly impossible to get any of them. I've been trying to buy another 4 with 8 GB for over a year now, but am not willing to go beyond 80 € for just the board.
You can get them on eBay for <$100, they will typically have a fair amount of RAM and a quad-core AMD CPU (enough to outperform a raspberry pi pretty easily), and they will typically be on the order of <20W of power usage, meaning that even running 4-5 of them with k8s/Docker-Swarm won't murder your power bill.
Just an example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/154783701325?hash=item2409d3d94d:g:...
You can pretty easily install Ubuntu or something on there and treat it like a normal computer.
Rent a Linux server, deploy the Tailscale client, run apps on it.
> should I really self-host on shared CPUs
That shouldn't generally be a problem unless you're a very high value target (or really unlucky), but if you're that worried, rent a bare metal server.
Bonus, those MicroServers are supported by ESXi, IIRC
It is a (fairly small) desktop tower, so it takes up quite a bit more space than a couple of Pis, though, again, it also encloses some internal hard drives, which is nice. I'm not sure about power use but I'd just gut-instinct guess it's equivalent to four or five Raspberries Pi, even if you take out the power to run the hard drives, so it is (probably) worse on that front.