Regardless of the size of the sponsor, commercial sponsorship would be fine, as long as they don’t post ads or try to influence the content in any way.

Unfortunately, that’s a combination that likely will never happen. Imagine if Reddit never had ads or bowed down to corporate pressure. That’s not a viable business model for a capitalist organization.

Yeah, that’s a big limitation.

Oracle is awesome in this one specific way. They suck in all other ways but this is really good.

I use portainer, and when I deploy an image, I write a short bash script for it.

• stop the image if running
• pull the image
• run the image

This lets me easily do updates. I have a script for each image I run, it’s less than a dozen. They’re all from public repositories.

My instance’s owner has a Patreon. I give there. I definitely recommend that others do the same.

Ok, this should be pretty easy then. Just set up an instance in a cloud service provider (Oracle has lots of free stuff for this) and set up wireguard. Establish a VPN connection to your cloud server and port forward from there.

If you do know how to protect that open port then this should be pretty straightforward.