At my first job/internship it was fish names (they were dev/qa servers so wiped almost daily): Crappie, Bluegill, Walleye, Marlin, etc.
Current job is medical so it's all professional (i.e gr01sec02, gr02sccm01)
At home I've got a couple of naming schemes for different device types.:
Phones: i-telleuwat(last 4 of the number)
PCs and Media centers: playon(last octet of the IP)
Servers:gimme(service thats hosted)
Yunohost is, to me anyways, a good stepping stone in learning the hosting side of things. You can have something up and running while you learn the rest.
I don't think you should feel bad about it, everyone needs some kind of "training wheels" or "guard rails" when they're first getting in to any hobby.
I think of it in terms of my other hobbies, would I have started off in electronics repair if I had to fix a modern motherboard for my first project? Maybe, but I would have struggled mightily. Instead I started doing simpler circuits and worked my way up while learning theory and technique.
No the one you asked, but I'm running pihole on a lenovo M93 (fedora server) with 8Gb of ram. No kill like overkill, I guess.
The only time any of the cpu cores pops above 1% is when I'm updating the config, and at the moment it is hovering at 293 MB of RAM used according to the free command.
I use Opensuse on my stuff too. I do bare metal though, because I'm old and this newfangled docker stuff frightens and confuses me.
Personally, I use a "scratch built" machine to act as a file server/media server. Someone was going to recycle it at the office, so I added some hard drives and put it in a larger case.
It really comes down to two things in my mind: what can you afford and how deep do you want to follow the rabbit hole?
If you want something quick and easy, sure go for the premade. Nothing wrong with that.
If you want to use it as a learning tool, and add other services, then I think a home spun server is the way to go.
Just my 2 cents.
I have a stack of lenovo m93s & M900s from when our hospital was bought out by a larger one. Installed opensuse on a couple to act as web/app servers for dinking around with.
My storage server is an old Ryzen desktop someone was going to recycle with a bunch (24TB) of extra drives added. Opensuse as well.
I usually just do bare metal because that is how I was taught back in the day, and since they're only accessible internally it doesn't make much of a difference security wise.
They took them out of my small town, mostly due to the company (I think it was Bird in our area) not picking them up for weeks on end.
I'm personally glad they're gone, too many douche canoes leaving them in the handicapped parking spots and on the walking trails. Finally had to lodge a complaint with the company when we found a bunch of them in front of the ER at my workplace...not like we have people who have mobility issues going in there or anything.