I'm slowly configuring my new VPS. Here's approach I'm taking:
1. RHEL 9 with Developer Subscription. Installed dnf-automatic, set `reboot = when-changed`, so it's zero effort to reliably apply all updates with daily reboots. One or two minutes of downtime, not a big deal.
2. For services: podman with quadlets. It's RH-flavoured replacement for docker-compose. Not sure, if I like it, but I guess that's the "future", so I'm embracing it. Every service is a custom-built image with common parent to reduce space waste (by reusing base OS layer).
So far I want to run static http (nginx), vaultwarden, postfix and some webmail. May be more in the future.
This setup wastes a lot of disk space for image data, so expect to order few more gigabytes of disk to pay for modern tech.