I would honestly just set up Arch or Gentoo Linux (or NixOS if you’re feeling adventurous) from scratch on either a VM or a NUC / cheap local machine as a home

I would honestly just set up Arch or Gentoo Linux (or NixOS if you’re feeling adventurous) from scratch on either a VM or a NUC / cheap local machine as a home server to start. This was how I learned Linux and it’s pretty satisfying having a server at home. Once you’ve got that under your belt you can either use DynDNS or rebuild your setup on a VPS. Bonus points if you can start using a single implementation across both instances so your homeserver and remote are replicas / peers.