There are three things I'd recommend though that the articles kind of gloss over:
* get reasonable OOB access as a priority
* get real server hardware
* set up backup on day 1
OOB access can be as simple as a serial console server that your colo provider lets you access (most modern servers still have DE9 serial ports!), but ideally you want server hardware with an IPMI. It is fantastic for saving you from the 'oh no, I just firewalled myself out' problem (my colo provider is about an hour away, I don't want to do that trek on my weekends!), and with a proper IPMI you can boot from an ISO file over USB to do things like OS upgrades/reinstalls/recovery or firmware updates with ease. I personally have a Mikrotik router doing WireGuard for me to connect to for remote access to secure the IPMI behind a VPN.
Real server hardware saves you a ton of time & money in the long run for less upfront cost than you think. There's a lot of options - HP/Dell for more traditional choices (incl on site servicing options), Supermicro are well established, and there are more recent challengers that are putting out reasonable hardware like ASRock Rack. You should expect to buy this in a B2B fashion - you'll probably talk to/email a salesperson, but I've found I get ridiculously better pricing this way than buying online. As a bonus, you get an IPMI, ECC RAM that works, hot-swap drive trays, etc. In my experience, this kind of hardware really rarely fails - it's designed for 24x7 usage.
There's lots of backup options. You might push to something like Backblaze b2, use someone like BorgBase, or push backups to home. I have a home server with a bunch of hard disks, so I do a mix - I use borgbackup & push my backups daily to both my home server and to BorgBase.
My personal colo right now is an ASRock Rack EPYC 4004 barebone with a 12 core 24 thread CPU, 128G of RAM, 2x 2TB NVMe SSD, 2x 4TB SATA SSD, another 2x 2TB SATA SSD. I use quite a bit of the storage, and I use it to self-host a bunch of useful things - eg GitLab, CI, email, containers via Docker, side projects, the odd game server for playing things with friends. Adding up what those would cost me to host individually via VMs, AWS, GitHub subscriptions, etc makes paying for colocation an option I'm very happy with!