That doesn’t seem to be too old of a laptop at all. One thing I’d say is to use an SSD as the main partition you run your apps on, as HDDs might be quite slow.

If you wanna keep the VPS, you can use it as a public inbound gateway + outbound VPN for your homeserver, so traffic looks like it comes in and out of your VPS. I wrote some notes on setting up Tailscale in such a manner, but there’s plenty of other options.

If you don’t wanna keep the VPS, you can front your inbound traffic with Cloudflare Tunnels, and use a VPN for outbounds. If you don’t have any apps that make frequent network requests (e.g. a Matrix server), then a VPN may not be necessary

You should leave SSH on, especially if if you wanna run it without a monitor, but use key auth and limit it to your LAN only