(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?
You need a VPN or a reverse proxy or similar for this.
What you want is either a service that gives you an IP address unrelated to your physical location (a VPN), or a machine that is willing to accept connections for you and forward them transparently to your machine (a reverse proxy).
You can set up your own VPN to proxy connections by getting a host from ~any hosting service and running something like OpenVPN on it.