When I was at college, I used a free tier AWS box to allow me to make things inside the school network public through some SSH and proxy shenanigans, and I used the box to let me escape the anti-vpn firewall rules they had by tunneling my VPN service through SSH

Unfortunately, this is a third party, but considering its a cloud platform, it might be a bit more reliable than a third party service.

Those aren’t worth it imo. Those specs are pretty bad for the price. As someone who has a server like that (although newer specs), it is pretty expensive to run, sitting at between 100-200$ a month in electricity if run non-stop, granted I live in an area with higher-than-average electricity prices. Taking out 1 CPU will be negligible on power, but have drastic impact on performance. Another consideration is storage, which will be expensive with enterprise 2.5” drives, so be aware of that. Fans in dell servers (or at least the one I own) tend to be quiet if configured to use low fan speeds when under low load. I used to have one in my dorm room under my bed, and I could barely hear the fan whine when trying to sleep, but I could drown it out with a box fan or quiet music

This looks like a port scanning address, which is normal. Being scanned is just a fact of life if you host a service on the internet. What exactly was in your access log? Is it a connection on / ? Is it a 404 on a weird path? Is it accessing data on a service you run?

Personally, I’d block the IP and move on, since 99 times in 100, its not too big of a deal since an automated scan won’t do much. If it is scanning services you actively run, it would warrant digging in deeper, reading all logs and bit more closely, but it is still not too likely it will result in an intrusion.