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.
Likely not, the thing is that most of the big cloud providers definitely have a networking team and it definitely monitors for bittorrent traffic. The thing is they will monitor but until they get a DMCA you normally don’t get popped. However, some providers are more finnicky than others and will disable you immediately if you use 6881 w/o encryption. The key really is not to get a DMCA and not use default ports.