Lot of sales for 4th of july (and ongoing ones) where you can pay $10-$14 for a YEAR of a small cheap VPS. Usually only has 1GB of memory, but that’s plenty to play around with and learn. If nothing else, a good cheap ipv4 you can use for some port forwarding. There are lots of options, but I’ve used racknerd and ethernetservers which have been fine.
I have my own server at home, but I bought two small ones to start learning Ansible with in a risk free way. Eventually plan to redo my main server with a complete Ansible setup, really want to hop on that “infrastructure as code” train.
I scored an Optiplex 7050 SFF with 250GB SSD, 16GB RAM, and an i5-6500 for under $100 on an ebay auction last year. I threw in another 16 GB of RAM, an i7-7700, 300W PSU from an Optiplex XE3 (factory for a 7050 SFF is 180W…), factory SD card reader + faceplate, and an Nvidia Quadro K1200 (why? I don’t remember, but it’s better than the iGPU).