I have this too on occasion! Although, I think I had this problem on another podcast player before I switched.

Fiery Habanero Doritos

No need to worry, those security patches would be millennia ahead of any contemporaneous trojans.

Alliteration, Rhythm, Rhyme, and I like properly made tea.

Cheapest would probably be the Raspberry Pi/Orange Pi route.

I gave up trying to make an HTPC (using Kodi, ChimeraOS, etc). It wasn’t worth the hassle and ended up settling for an Apple TV.

Sure, you can use a VPN if you want to spin up the instance and connect to it without having a domain. You can always open the instance of Nextcloud to the internet later, when you buy a domain.

Get a cheap .XYZ domain if you just want to experiment with spinning up a reverse proxy.