(I asked this on r*ddit a long while ago, but I don’t think I explained myself properly)
Basically, I would like to host a few services on my own metal (and not anywhere else in the world!) to play around with and learn, like my personal site, lemmy instance, vpn, fdroid, image host, etc etc.
I would also like to hide my public IP address because I don’t want people who connect to me to know my location (even if it’s rather coarse).
I know that this isn’t possible without at least another server in a different physical location, but I really have no idea how to approach this. What software do I run? What is this action called? What do any of these AWS/Azure service names mean? How much would I realistically need to pay? Etc etc.
Anyone have any pointers?
Maybe take a look into Cloudflare Tunnels, which sounds like will do what you want (maybe not VPN though).
The short version is you run a daemon on your local network that Cloudflare talks to. So, outside requests only see Cloudflare, and communication from your network only goes to Cloudflare. Your IP is not exposed to consumers. This is free! Though you are not supposed to send video/pictures though the tunnel and have them cache it without using one of their (paid) services, but it’s simple to disable caching for a host. I do use their DNS, though I cannot recall if that’s a requirement for Tunnels, though.
Keep in mind you should still set up some sort of firewall, as people can and do just scan the entire IPv4 address range looking for open ports.