I think a lot of people just haven’t heard of Caddy. Since I’ve found it I haven’t used anything else.

No one has mentioned Njalla. I haven’t used their server offerings, but they are probably the best for privacy.

https://njal.la/servers/

If you’re the only one connecting to the server, I would recommend something like Tailscale. Everything will be encrypted and you won’t need to forward any ports to the public internet.

If other people need to access it, an option might be https://hoppy.network. I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks like it would be pretty slick if it works well.

It’s not a Termius alternative, but I found that after setting up Tailscale SSH on all my servers, I don’t really bother using Termius any more.

The plain macOS terminal looks better to me anyway

I don’t recommend Oracle at all if you value your sanity. Paying a couple bucks a month for DigitalOcean or Vultr (or probably almost anything else) is so worth it compared to dealing with that monstrosity

Also, I’ve experienced this, and I’ve heard reports of others having the same issue; Oracle might just randomly delete/disable your VPS

Like the other commenter mentioned, ChatGPT can be really helpful for these kind of questions. I’m not sure if there’s any “starter guide” since everyone starts with different wants and needs.

I will say, you should look into Tailscale once you’ve got your services up and running on your home network. Tailscale makes it simple and secure to access those services from outside your home network without any port forwarding.

This is a dream come true. Also it's not working at all for me but I imagine they'll work out the kinks over the next few weeks

Tailscale is great but I find it non trivial to run in conjunction with another VPN (Mullvad). Anyone have experience with this? Seems I can have only one or the other for iOS or macOS

and I always advice to not use a different party for nameservers than the party that registered the domain.

Why is that? I register most of my domains at Porkbun, but I usually use Cloudflare’s nameservers as they seem to support more record types, have more features, and have a better UI than most registrars’ offerings.

Nice. You might miss out on firmware updates, though.

If you don’t want them to see your DNS requests, you can use DNS Over HTTPS (DoH) or DNS Over TLS (DoT) I think

I’m trying to collect all the apps! I’ve got Mlem, Memmy, and Rennes and I signed up for the Artemis waitlist