Can give NixOS a try if you want to make things extra hard and get more satisfaction from finishing. The biggest advantage is most of your OS & services config will be in a file, so there’s no need to remember a thousand knobs to tune the experience just the way you want - a text file in a git repo will be all your config.
I’d recommend Namecheap over porkbun. I found porkbun has less features. I specifically needed to wildcard forward email, which works well on namecheap.
If you’re from Africa, India or some other country where $10 / year is a lot I recommend a 111 class B domain gen.xyz/1111b for $1 / year.
Do you have static IPv4 or globally routable public IPv6 address assigned to your device? I’m ipv6 only selfhoster, and I use inadyn and afraid
Can use wireguard and then later open ssh once you feel more comfortable.