Can be ott yeah. I set mine up to understand how it all works and just kept things going.

No love for kubernetes?

Honestly, if you want small and cheap get a raspberry pi to play around or rent a VM.

If you care about storage too you can get a Synology NAS (pricy) which is pretty newbie proof and comes out of the box with different and photo sync along with support for VMs or docker.

LineageOS on the Shield? Any drawbacks?

This. While great in winter it’s not so fun in summer.

Telegram bot doesn’t need static IP, it connects to the service and does a get for updates. Default python wrapper polls.

That being said pythonanywhere or heroku are good cheap options.

I run a bunch of bots, some databases plus

• Jellyfin
• Unifi controller
• Radar
• Sonarr
• Lidarr
• Bazarr
• nzbhydra2
• Sabnzbd
• Heimdall
• Twitch points miner 2