A few questions as you’re self hosting an instance and I haven’t read much about it yet.
Are you hosting it on personal hardware?
Can you just choose any free name for the domain if it’s on your own hardware or do you need to rent one regardless?
Do you keep it active all the time or turn it off for the night/other periods of time where you know you won’t use it?
Me to my little program for scraping some stories: “Hm, ‘Ignore robots.txt’? Sure, let’s do that by default please :D”