I started out self hosting on a laptop maybe a little newer than yours. Pentium, 2gb RAM. I’m happier with my pi, but it’s more than enough to get started on. Pretty sure pi-hole will run no problem, the others my struggle a little bit depending on your disk speed.

Your cpu will be a pretty limiting factor, but upgrading the RAM and putting in an SSD could boost the performance quite a bit.

Yes! I got a cheap .tech domain, and it kept increasing price year after year. Eventually it got a lot cheaper to just grab a .com.

Cloudflare has the best prices for domain names, they sell them at cost

deleted by creator

If the phone is lost/stolen/damaged, your SD card could be inaccessible too. Your backups are your business, but you are opening yourself up to all kinds data loss if your only backups are stored within the device in question.