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 think it depends on the ISP. In my country (Croatia) most of the ISPs, if not all, change your IP address every 24h no matter what. You can force the IP change when you restart the router so if I restart mine at 2am it will change my IP every day at 2am.
What OS? I run a Linux router that when the IP changes it just updates the DNS record. Worst case I’m down for 5 minutes. But have never noticed anything.
For several years I connected to my home surveillance cameras via dynamic IP. It went months at a time without change, very infrequent. Created a tasker profile, android app, to pull IP daily when my alarm went off in the morning. If IP changed I would get a notification with the new IP address. I could then reconfigure my connection when needed.
