### Serious questions about webhosting
Please boost.
I am looking for webhosting to play with a bunch of installations for exploring software development & coding ideas, not public interaction *at this time*.
Will.install Mastodon and Wordpress, plus likely Pleroma, Friendica, Matrix, Discourse & Git.
Very small data volume & storage, but multiple domains, websites & email addresses.
Could you help me with choosing dedicated/cloud/vpn and selecting a webhost. I would prefer dedicated if I can afford it.
I am familiar with Cpanel & PHP., and I have run WikiMedia & Wordpress sites, 10 years ago.
OR, if you are interested in similar ideas, we could make a hosting relationship.
You did specify approximate minimal requirements, but I don't see what you want to optimize for. Cost? Ease of tinkering? Ease of use while avoiding tinkering? Something else?
Have you considered hosting it in your office/kitchen/...? Why/why not?
I have not set physical location. Ease of tinkering, code dev.
With some amount of projection: I think ease of tinkering is maximized if you basically get an x86_64 VM and manage Linux (I assume) that's running there yourself.
I'm not sure why you prefer dedicated machine over a VM (or did you mean over shared hosting?). VMs are much cheaper and for small experimental things not much worse, if at all.
When looking at VM providers pay attention to how they charge for network throughput. Charging for it is quite common (as opposed to charging for "an X Mbps link upstream", for some definition thereof). Charging more for traffic outward is also common. Sometimes this can dominate the price of the whole thing.
I have a VM at Hetzner that costs me on the order of magnitude of $5 per month. (If you wanted to run all the things you described you might need more RAM and thus pay 10ish$/mo? I'm not sure.) It works, the network traffic accounting is reasonable, but I haven't tried the competition.
One thing that does not meet your requirements for hosting (it's shared hosting only), but (a) might be a good place to use to register your domains/set up DNS/set up a small static site for w/e reason/... (b) rubs me in the correct direction as far as the way they treat customers go[*], is nearlyfreespeech.net.
Lastly, the hardest thing of all that you've described is hosting e-mail. You might wish to know that there are many hybrid approaches to e-mail hosting (e.g. proxying outgoing mail through someone who can authenticate "you" and trusts "you" enough to proxy).
[*] the concept of "we don't run loss leaders", "let the user decide what kind of security against them being impersonated they want", ...
