Also, don’t forget Debian testing. Once you are comfortable or gain enough experience to move closer to not-that-stable, or, if you have spare machine/harddisk to try now, Debian testing is a very good balance between stable and unstable. I know many people against it, so just my opinion and I am happily use it as my main desktop as well on my home sever for 10+ years. Again I am IT person and rare case it does breaks. if you ever want to try some new packages, there is Debian testing.

No, you can run it on your own homelab just fine. If you don’t have it already, you just need a (usually free) dynamic subdomain so your instance have a normal URL instead of IP.