I have seem similar thread on Reddit, this answer I liked the most.

Hello can you hear me? Oh wait, wrong planet, sorry

Is the gist of it.

I do this in winter, warms my room a little while doing (what I think is) good.

I am using ZSH, that function that allows you to type part of the command and then do UP key to find previous command starts with same prefix is killer function for me.

(I don't know if this function is added by oh-my-zsh or not.)

some sort of dashboard with monitoring and statuses of all my services

See if Uptime Kuma suits your needs.

Are there any major no-no things a newbie might do with Docker/selfhosting that I should avoid?

Allow password based SSH authentication, you should look into key based authentication

I wanted to have it behind a domain, how would I achieve it?

Use a reverse proxy (like caddy) which serves different content based on domain name.

Stats from my seedbox (all public torrents)

Uploaded: 638.311 TiB

Downloaded: 29.120 TiB

Ratio: 21.91

Note: some .xyz domains (6-9digit numbers) are amazingly cheap, cost about 1USD/yr.

https://netboot.xyz/

You might not need it but it's a very small image (3.5MB for multi-arch iso) so why not?

Use a cellphone under trees in rain.

Learned few days ago that it's not actually dangerous, at least doesn't make you have a higher change to be struck by thunder.

Serverhunter is a search engine for cloud servers and has easy to use filter functions.

I am surprised that I didn't see anyone link to https://lowendtalk.com/ and https://lowendspirit.com/, OP can ask in both places and see what people have for offer.

Is it really crucial to find a VPN that supports port forwarding

It's crucial when the only seeder won't open their port.

what’s the go to option now that it’s becoming increasingly uncommon

My opinion: I wish qbittorrent 4.6 would release sooner, it comes with I2P support, which I've seen discussed on lemmy a few times.

Reasons I can think of:

1. The official Android client for lemmy, Jerboa, only supports 0.18 and later, unless users download older version from github and sideload manually.

2. Sorting is broken pre 0.18, new posts keeps flowing in.

3. Performance improvement by removing web socket from lemmy. (which fixes 2, which is why 1. happens)

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues