If you’re worried about unauthorized access to the physical machine, you could always just do disk-level encryption instead or store the app’s data in something like a Veracrypt virtual disk. They’d still be able to access the data if they go through your OS/user, but wouldn’t pick anything up by accessing the drive directly.

Nothing short of E2EE can truly stop someone from accessing your data if they have physical access to the server, but disk encryption would require a targeted attack to break, and no host is wasting their time targeting your meme server. I seriously doubt they’d access it even if you had no encryption at all, since if they get caught doing that they’d get in a heap of legal trouble and lose a ton of business.