I know the purists might sneer at me for this, but I just spun up a server via Hetzner so I could run Docker in the cloud

Not an answer to your question, but don’t let some gatekeeper… well, gate keep. There are many ways to selfhost. Running your own hardware is one, renting a VPS but hosting the services yourself is another one. One is not better than the other.

Just pick what is the best solution for you and your problem.