I did it from scratch following a guide from Linux Magazine from a few months ago. I had to do some modifying and it was a lot of work, but it runs pretty seamlessly now, so the effort was worth it. I’ll see if I can find it and tell you which month’s issue it was in.

I use lightsail exactly for that purpose. I’ve had my firewall using wireguard connected to lightsail for over 2 years now. Will rarely run into a block or glitched captcha loop but it does happen. I also pay for express VPN as a backup and have that on my phone, and surprisingly that is virtually never blocked. Performance with wireguard / lightsail is more consistent for all day use though

Just to add to the Asahi Linux chorus - I’m self hosting a bunch of things, not on VMs but installed on the actual OS, and it’s been incredibly fast and reliable. I do have thorough offsite backups happening because one should, but loving it so far.