Self-hosting

I have a piece of hardware which I do not intend to use as a desktop machine ever again.

It's a cheap and shitty HP laptop from 2019. AMD A6 processor, 8GB of RAM, 1TB spinning hard disk, and a DVD drive that hasn't worked in over a year.

Since I have hardware from 2007 that is nicer to use than this machine, I was thinking of turning it into a server.

I'd probably either install Proxmox, Alpine, HardenedBSD, or OpenBSD, and spin up a couple of lightweight services. I'd also spin up an HTTP server and move one of my blogs to this machine.

Since I'm currently using a VPS with far, far lower specs than this laptop, it should all be fine. However, I have some questions:

1. Is this a good idea?
2. Should I run the server over a VPN, or even go Tor-only, for personal safety reasons?
3. Since I'll usually be within walking distance of the server, should I disable SSH altogether?

Also, if anyone here has a crazy setup or some redneck networking, I'd love to hear about it.

Thank you!!!