I just started renting a basic VPS through Racknerd with the intent to use it as a reverse proxy to point friends to my game server instances running at home without exposing my public IP. I could not figure out how to get it to work so I gave up after days of trying and am now using playit.gg. I prepaid for a year of the VPS. What cool project should I try on it now?
As a beginner you could try it with https://yunohost.org
An option which covers a bunch of different experiments: set up PiHole on it (despite the name, it doesn’t need to be run on a raspberry pi) then set up a persistent VPN, for eg wireguard, or whatever your router supports, to it from where you are, and then setup your router to use it as your DNS server for your vlan.
Its a relatively simple set of tasks, but they build a good grounding for anything else you end up wanting to run on it.