Oddly, my recommendation for getting started is non-technical (and assumes you’re in the US): if you don’t have one already, stand up an LLC. Doesn’t need to be

Oddly, my recommendation for getting started is non-technical (and assumes you’re in the US): if you don’t have one already, stand up an LLC. Doesn’t need to be anything fancy; your state’s Secretary of State probably accepts an online form. I’m in CO and at its most basic form this costs $25 a year. You’ll need some kind of business entity to have easier conversations with ARIN, which is the starting point for getting yourself an ASN. Once you’ve got an ASN, you have an entity that can “own” IP blocks instead of just relying on other networks to handle that for you. Now, have a look at Neptune Networks’ offerings—they’ll rent you an instance for a reasonable monthly cost that they’ll allow transit to and from. Note that their smallest instance size doesn’t have enough RAM to store the global internet’s full BGP table; this will matter only once you know what that means. That’ll definitely get you started, and you can learn a lot on the cheap before even looking into your local colocation options.