Server management has gotten vastly easier over time as well, especially if you're just looking to host stuff "for fun."
Even without fancy orchestration tools, it's very easy to put together a few containers on your dev machine (something like Caddy for easy TLS and routing + hand rolled images for your projects) and just shotgun them onto the cheapest server you can find. At that point the host is just a bootloader for Podman and can be made maximally idiot-proof (see Fedora CoreOS.)
