I use my Oracle free tier for Tor Snowflake. It was a service I didn’t really want to run myself and not something I ever need to connect to so if Oracle suddenly shuts down my server for any reason then it’s no loss for me. In the meantime it provides value for people in countries with harsh internet censorship, so I’m happy to just set it up and leave it.

I second NPM. As you mentioned it’s been very easy to use, but I also haven’t been trying to do anything complicated.

I’ve never used load balancing so perhaps Caddy or Traefik is easier to use than NPM in that regard, but I wouldn’t know.